ill 



pij|! L'i'i-l! 

if 



' ii ill 



i ! 



mh: 



'mi 



'"ii 

iiiil: 



ii 



m 



■!k 



W 



■'him 



ill 

ll-illiiWllil!" 



m 



m 



Ii i!i 



li'ii'ihi 



,i'iiti| 

Mrl'' i:. 



Ww 



f!! 

P 

i1l!'!iil!lii'ip|! 
I!!!;ll,vi 

ill Illy!':: 'Pi 



tiiiji , 
iiiili 



(i 



il' 



il'Sillii: 

llf.llilt, , 










Qass 1^ \iU Q^5^ 
I S 0_ '2. 



THE SPORTING LIFE 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

AND OTHER TRIFLES 



BY 

ROBERT LYND 

u 



%• 



' The little victims play " 
Gray. 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1922 



^ 






'^ o *r X H ii 



Printed in Great Britain by the Riverside Press Limited 
Edinburgh 



^ 

I 



(yz 



TO 
PAUL HENRY 



My dear Paul, 

May I dedicate The Sporting Life to you, 
not because you catch an occasional fish in the 
intervals of painting, but because of the amusing 
days when we lived together in the same studio 
and owed money to the same milkman ? 
Yours, 
fune^ 1922 Robert Lynd. 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

I. THE GRAND NATIONAL : THE DAY BEFORE 

AND THE LIVERPOOL CUP . . 11 

II. THE GRAND NATIONAL : BACKING THE 

WINNER . . . .18 

III. THE LOVE OF MONEY . .27 

IV. SEEING THE BOAT RACE . 85 

V. WHAT A night's BOXING IS LIKE . 42 

VI. TEST MATCHES : GREGORY'S ATTACK AT 

TRENT BRIDGE . . ,50 

VII. TEST MATCHES : THE CROWD "bARRACKs" 59 

VIII. TEST MATCHES : DISGRACEFUL SCENES 

AT lord's . . . .66 

IX. TEST MATCHES : WOOLLEY THE HERO . 78 

X. TEST MATCHES : TENNYSOn's CAPTAINCY 

AT LEEDS . . . .85 

XI. TEST MATCHES : BROWn's AMUSING 

INNINGS . . . .95 

XII. TEST MATCHES : AUSTRALIA WINS THE 

RUBBER .... 103 

XIII. TEST MATCHES : A ROW AT THE OVAL . Ill 

XIV. TEST MATCHES : MEAD SCORES 182 NOT 

OUT ..... 121 

XV. TEST MATCHES : MERELY PLAYERS . 127 

XVI. SPORT ..... 132 

XVII. BUS TICKETS .... 140 
9 



CONTENTS 



XVIII. I AM TAKEN FOR A PICKPOCKET 
XIX. THE NEW HALF-CROWN 
XX. MY HAT 
XXI. EATING 
XXII. ON WEARING A COLLAR 

XXIII. ON BEING SHY 

XXIV. A SMALL BOY's APPETITE 
XXV. HAMPSTEADOPHOBIA 

XXVI. RETURNING FROM A HOLIDAY 

XXVII. JOAN BUBBLE MAKES HER FORTUNE 

XXVIII. TWO TRAVELLERS WERE TALKING 

XXIX. HOW MANY WINDOWS HAS YOUR 
HOUSE ? . 

XXX. ON PICTURE POSTCARDS 

XXXI. A GREAT CRICKETER — AND ME 

XXXn. THE MONEY-LENDER 

XXXIII. THE CHEMIST 

XXXIV. SITTING UP FOR THE NEW YEAR 
XXXV. A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE . 

XXXVI. A MEDITATION ON MILK 

XXXVII. child's talk 

XXXVIII. WHY PAY TAXES ? 
XXXIX. OLD CLOTHES 
XL. THE MASTER 
XLI. BATHS 
XLII. THE NAMES OF HORSES 
XLIII. CAPTAIN CUTTLE WINS THE DERBY 
XLIV. ROYAL HUNT CUP DAY AT ASCOT 
10 



I 

THE GRAND NATIONAL 

THE DAY BEFORE AND THE LIVERPOOL CUP 

IT was distressing to be given boiled cod for 
lunch on the train from London, especially 
at a time when Dover soles could be bought 
for a shilling a pound even from a fishmonger. 
But otherwise the eve of the Grand National passed 
pleasantly enough. 

Liverpool is crowded, but in that it hardly differs 
from any other city. The difference is that Liver- 
pool is crowded to its last hotel — nay, to its last 
saloon bar — with the nomadic population called 
the racing crowd. It is a crowd that deserves the 
respect of every journalist, because it never tires of 
buying newspapers. It buys even the editions in 
which there is nothing to read — gathers on the 
pavements, indeed, to wait for a new edition as 
for an event of the day. 

Liverpool is also distinguished from other cities 
by making two-thirds of a mile for a shilling the 
unit of payment in taxis, with an* extra threepence 
for every additional sixth of a mile. The fare would 
be exceedingly difficult to work out for anybody but a 
higher mathematician, were it not for the taximeter. 
II 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

The scale of charges has one advantage — it makes 
the hands of the taximeter go round faster than in 
any other city. It was a pleasure to sit in the taxi 
and watch them on the otherwise dull road that 
leads out to Aintree. I reckoned, later in the day, 
that it was also a good deal cheaper than backing 
West Countryman for the Liverpool Cup. 

The Aintree course is a charming oval, intersected 
with green ways between white railings. It is more 
or less entirely surrounded by railway trains, the 
smoke of which rose in the mist as from a line 
of low smouldering volcanoes shunted hither and 
thither. 

It is for the moment a parliament of book-makers. 
It was pleasant to see them working as hard as ever — 
hard enough, indeed, to have satisfied even so exacting 
a moralist as Samuel Smiles. Standing on their 
little stools about three inches high, they formed a 
British square in every ring, each with his badge, 
his clerk, and his wallet of notes, and each of them 
roaring like a bull. 

Some of them wore horseshoes in their buttonholes 
with their names printed on them. They wore them, 
I noticed, the wrong way up. A horseshoe should be 
worn with the heels pointing upwards — cup-shaped, 
so to speak — so as not to spill the luck out. Even 
so, I am forced to admit that the bookmakers 
looked more prosperous than I do, with my five 
rusty horseshoes all in the right position above 
the mantelpiece. 

12 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

But if ever there was a body of men who deserved 
to prosper it is they. 

They are respectable, indefatigable, charitable 
men. They are charitable, not in the nigghng 
fashion of the Charity Organisation Society, but 
with a gracious fairy-tale and Father-Christmas 
charity. They are charitable in the old tradition 
of the saints. They give you money without asking 
you to work for it. 

No employer I ever knew offered me a five-pound 
note for guessing the name of a horse. Yet that 
is what every bookmaker, even the himiblest of 
them, does daily. If I guessed West Countryman, 
the fault cannot be imputed to the bookmakers. 
They were perfectly willing to pay out if I guessed 
Grandcourt. 

Even harder-working than the bookmakers are 
the bookmakers' signallers. They are professionally 
known, I believe, as the tic-tac men. 

These admirable men, some of them wearing 
tight-waisted coats and canary gloves, and with 
field-glasses slung round their shoulders, take up 
their positions at various points on the roofs of the 
stands and in the rings and heliograph the latest 
prices among the leading bookmakers to every 
quarter of the field. 

Travellers tell us of the miraculous speed with which 
news is spread in the African jungle. It is nothing to 
the speed with which news of a change in the betting 
is spread among the bookmakers on a race-course. 
13 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

I do not profess to understand the signals. One 
fat, red-faced man kept covering his nose with his 
right hand and swinging his left arm up and down 
like a bellringer. 

Another sometimes signalled like a Boy Scout, 
and sometimes caught the tip of his ear, or his chin, 
or pressed his nose between two gloved fingers. 
Others flashed race-cards most of the time. Others 
again performed grotesque pantomimes, and if you 
had seen them on the cinema screen you would have 
said they were threatening to knock down walls or 
to push people over cliffs. 

The whole system is undoubtedly a triumph of 
organisation. It shows that at least one body of 
Englishmen has been able to carry on the lessons 
of the war into times of peace. The same energy 
applied to the problems of housing or unemployment 
would have made England a land fit for heroes to 
do something more than bet in. 

There were gleams of sunshine, and between the 
races, as one moved with the crowd to the paddock 
behind the stands, one arrived in a little nook of 
warmth and quiet. 

Here one was cut off alike from the voices of the 
bookmakers and the cold winds. Here within a 
circle of prying spectators — judges of horseflesh like 
you and me — the horses, still in their overcoats, 
paraded on the green grass, ambling as if in a dream. 
The men and women who watched them whispered 
to each other as if in a dream, whispered their 
14 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

fancies, exchanged the name of Trespasser for 
the name of Glorioso as the certain winner of the 
Liverpool Cup. 

Speech is nowhere else so gentle as round the pad- 
dock of a race-course. If a man knows something 
about a horse he does not cry it aloud : he murmurs 
it like a secret with half-shut lips. To move amid 
such secrets is to move in a world of enchantment. 
Trespasser, however, is a difficult word to whisper 
without being overheard. 

Nearly everybody was whispering it. 

And, indeed, when Trespasser was led out for the 
parade in front of the stands there was excuse for 
admiration. He had an air of solid and easy 
strength that seemed likely to outlast some of the 
livelier and leaner creatures — West Countryman, for 
instance — who paced after him in procession. 

Grandcourt, restive under his silken and salmon- 
clad jockey, seemed eager to waste his strength 
before the race had begun. He flew off up the course 
for a preliminary gallop with such a bolting ardour 
that men cried out : " He's run away with him ! " 

Horse after horse sprang after him to try the grass, 
each with a figure from a scrap-book sitting or, 
rather, standing with its knees about his neck — every 
horse, I should have said, except West Countryman. 
West Countr5rnfian preferred to prance and back, 
and behave like a disobedient child, in the neigh- 
bourhood of the starting post. There never was 
a beast I hated so. 

15 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

The start for the Liverpool Cup was certainly a 
bad one. The horses hopped about in a cluster, like 
animals trying to keep their feet on a frozen pond. 
Trespasser walked round and round the general 
melee in a circle. Then, while they still seemed 
uncertain what they meant to do, the flag fell, the 
tape rose to let them pass, the bell rang, and Grand- 
court, with his salmon-bloused rider, was off among 
the leaders. 

People did not cry " They're off ! " They cried 
" What a rotten start ! " Some of them I thought 
were unnecessarily blasphemous about the rottenness 
of the start. 

It may have been a rotten start, but it was not a 
rotten race. A bookmaker down below was stilJ 
offering six to one against Glorioso. A man beside 
me shouted scornfully : " You may as well say sixty- 
six to one while you're at it. He'll never see it." 

The horses grew dim in the distance beyond the 
rails in the half mist. Then they turned the corner 
and, as they crossed the far side of the field, they 
seemed to fly from one another like shadows. Soon 
we could distinguish the jockeys' colours, and people 
murmured : " Trespasser wins ! " " Glorioso wins ! " 
" No, Grandcourt wins ! " 

As they came towards us, the two leading horses 
lengthened like running hounds. Each of them bore 
on, as though the jockey's will were sending magic 
through its long frame. It was magic striving 
against magic. The crowd roared : " Trespasser ! " — 
i6 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

as though to give him that last ounce of fierceness 
that would enable him to spring beyond the other. 
But, for every spring Trespasser gave, Grandcourt 
gave as bold a spring. 

They dashed past the stands, each refusing to be 
conquered. But Grandcourt had conquered, and 
the crowd slowly emptied itself out of the stands, 
and through the passages under them, towards 
the paddock again. Those who had won said : " A 
grand race." Those who had lost said: "Did you 
ever see such a rotten start ? " 

Some of them, as I have said, were unnecessarily 
blasphemous about the rottenness of the start. 
I, for my part, if I had wished to be blasphemous, 
could have said a few things about West Countryman. 



17 



II 

THE GRAND NATIONAL 

BACKING THE WINNER 

IT was one of those rainy days on which Liver- 
pool is of a gloomy, nondescript colour — 
the colour of wet flagstones that shine just 
eiiough to show the blurred reflections of the 
passers-by. 

Even so, lines of trams were waiting long before 
noon to take overcoated holiday-makers out to see 
the Grand National, and the overcoated holiday- 
makers were rushing to pack them. 

" Just the sort of day," said one of them, " that 
it was when Troy town won." 

His friend, a young man of thirty, his features 
sharp with thoughts about money, denied it. 

"It was a hundred times worse," he declared, 
" the day Troy town won. I shan't forgit it. I had 
to lay in bed for six months afterwards." 

This will give you some idea of the strength of 
character race-going develops in the young. It was 
a pneumonia day, a pleurisy day, at the very least a 
chill- on- the-liver day. Yet even those who had had 
bitter experience of going to race-meetings on such 
a day in the past were exposing themselves to the 
i8 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

elements as freely as if they had been eonscribed for 
the purpose. 

I found an advertisement in one of the sporting 
papers that may help to explain their hardihood. 
"Why work?" ran a tipster's appeal. "By 
availing yourself of our information you can live 
in ease and comfort without." 

As an alternative to work, racing has undoubted 
advantages. It is more exhausting than work, but 
it is not so deadlily monotonous. Even one's salary 
grows monotonous. The racing man's income is at 
least never the same for two days running. 

On the roadside near the race-course all manner 
of sellers of pigs' feet, tripe, ginger ale, and oranges 
were ranged in the rain. Just outside the entrance 
to the course was a little square filled with groups of 
men and women listening to tipsters. 

Chief of the tipsters was " Old Pizzey " — an aged 
man in a faded silk hat with rings on his fingers and 
with, I have no doubt, bells on his toes. He had a 
banner behind him which declared that he was the 
" Daddy " of racing knowledge. I understand that, 
as there was more than one Homer, so there is more 
than one Pizzey, and that Old Pizzey must not be 
confused with Mr Mark Pizzey of Ascot. 

"Everybody knows Old Pizzey," he assured us. 
" You can't open a paper, no matter what it is, 
without seeing my name in it. I'm ninety years old 
— ninety. Half of you people that are standing round 
must have seen me here for the last seventy years." 

19 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

" Good old Pizzey I " shrieked his young assistant, 
rushing into the middle of the ring of spectators. 
" Listen ! " he screamed, and he really had the most 
appalling voice, and was red in the face with straining 
it. " Old Pizzey knows what he's talking about. 
Old Pizzey has a reputation. Open any paper — 
in — the — universe, and you'll find Old Pizzey 's 
name in it. 

" Old Pizzey, he has tipped more winners than 
Rothschild or Solly Joel ever owned. He's got a 
sure thing to-day; 'e 'as the surest thing in the 
'istory of the world. There are tipsters round 'ere," 
he said, pointing towards rival rings, " dressed up 
as jockeys. Old Pizzey don't need to dress up as a 
jockey. But he's as much a jockey as they are. 

" There are black men," he screamed in greater 
frenzy still, pointing towards a negro rival, " selling 
tips to-day — savages from South America and the 
African jungles. Listen ! Old Pizzey's different." 

" I'm the ' daddy ' of Turf knowledge," Old Pizzey 
agreed, nodding his venerable Henry-Irving head. 
" A man once asked me," he murmured, " why I 
didn't dress up as a jockey. ' Go hon,' I says to him. 
' Wouldn't I look a bloomin' fool ? ' " 

" Listen ! " his assistant broke out again, his eyes 
starting out of his head, with evangelistic fervour. 
" The papers tell you Southampton's going to win 
to-day. It has about as much chance of winning 
as " — he looked round for a symbol of disgusting 
incompetence — " as that tree." 

20 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

Just then my attention was distracted by a weird 
and unearthly yell, and, turning round, I saw a 
tall Negro in a three-cornered hat made out of a 
newspaper striding up and down in the crowd, 
out-topping them all. 

He uttered what may well have been a jungle 
war-chant as he walked. He was wearing a scarlet 
jacket with gold braid, and over this he wore a long 
overcoat with a fur collar. 

Having alarmed us into gazing at him, he began 
to denounce the newspapers for their ignorance of 
horses. He laughed at those who had tipped Shaun 
Spadah ; he jeered at those who had tipped South- 
ampton ; he sneered at almost every horse that 
anybody else had fancied. 

The Negro himself apparently knew more about 
horses than any sporting journalist. As far as I 
could gather, he knew at least as much as Old Pizzey. 
They must both be very rich men, knowing so much 
as they do about horses. 

I passed from tipster to tipster without buying a 
tip even from the man who looked like a Coalition 
Member of Parliament, and introduced us to a 
little chap who, he said, was the brother of Steve 
Donoghue. 

He seemed to know at least as much about 
horses as either Old Pizzey or the Negro. He, 
too, I suspect, has a tidy sum put away at the 
bank. 

Inside the turnstiles of the race-course it was dull 

21 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

enough after the animated addresses and other 
noises of the tipsters. The rain beat a tattoo on 
one's hat. Early comers crept into the bars and 
refreshment tents out of the cold, wet wind. The 
bookmakers stood in the ring as in a desert, dismal 
and silent most of them, under umbrellas. A book- 
maker's umbrella, it should be said, is something 
worth calling an umbrella. It is more like the roof 
of a house than like the umbrellas Christians carry. 
It is the sort of umbrella you could have a picnic 
under, but to-day it was no picnic. 

Slowly the bookies came to life and began shouting 
the odds — " Six to one the field," " Seven to one the 
field," " Eight to one bar one," " Ten to one bar 
two." 

Their cries were still but a mouse's squeak com- 
pared to the tumult that would be audible in an 
hour or so. 

They were, however, making enough noise to 
tempt me to put a small sum of money on a horse 
called Music Hall. I confess, not knowing very 
much about horses, I had never heard of Music Hall 
until forty-eight hours before. I saw in a little book 
I bought in a railway station, however — it was 
called by some attractive title, like Racing Up-to- 
Date — that he had once won a four-mile race, which 
was a race of about the same length as the Grand 
National. Strangely enough, the column in which 
this victory was recorded bore what I consider to 
be the luckiest of all lucky numbers. I also had a 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

third reason, but I will not tell it, as I do not wish 
to appear superstitious. It is enough to say that I 
spotted the winner as cleverly as if I had been the 
Negro or Old Pizzey. 

I then climbed into a stand and looked out over 
the misty course, with its pear-shaped enclosure in 
the centre, packed with buses, charabancs, motors, 
bookies, and more or less drowned human beings. 

Then a doubt assailed me. I went down into the 
ring again and backed Drifter. 

After I had had some lunch the thought insinuated 
itself into my mind : " Suppose an outsider should 
win?" I heard a bookmaker shouting; "Thirty- 
three to one General Saxham." I was at his ear in 
two minutes. 

" How much General Saxham ? " 

"Twenty-five to one," he said. 

" You said thirty- three," I reproached him. 

" Well, then, thirty- three," he said cheerfully, 
and after that I felt that I had done enough. . . . 

The Grand National is the most beautiful of all 
races. It is almost worth standing for hours in the 
rain amid dense terraces of human beings on the 
concrete roof of the stand to see so beautiful a race. 

To see the horses coming out one by one, each 
ridden by a jockey of the full stature of an ordinary 
man, and parading before the stands, was to see a 
prettier spectacle than met the eyes of Noah himself 
as he stood and watched the animals passing two by 
two, each after its kind, into the Ark. 
23 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Even in the leaden air, their caps, sleeves, and 
jackets were as rich in colours as a box of paints. 
It would be feeble to compare them to a rainbow. 
If you could imagine something with ten times as 
many colours as a rainbow, cut into little bits of 
all shapes and sizes, and then given out in odds 
and ends to be sewn together again into jackets and 
caps, according to the fantastic tastes of revellers, 
you will begin to have some small inkling of what 
the procession of the thirty-three horses that came 
on parade for the Grand National looked like. 

After a gallop to breathe themselves, the horses 
gradually collected in the neighbourhood of the 
starting-post. They moved restlessly, a flower-bed 
of colours, nodding and dancing in the breeze. 

Suddenly they bounded forward in a stream. A 
man with a white flag came and waved them back 
again. 

They got ready again. They streamed out like 
things thrown in a carnival. A man with a white flag 
came out once more and waved them energetically 
back. 

Then came the third start, and they were off — off 
through the white iron gates, and leaping over the 
first fence, a multitude of tiny waves. 

" Here comes the first disaster," cried someone. 
Other people cried : " No, they're all over." 

"No; there's one down!" "No; two!" "No; 
three. There are three down ! " 

Then they passed into the distance and the mist. 
24 



THE GRAND NATIONAL 

What happened at the Canal Jump and the other 
perilous jumps I could not tell. 

By the time the horses came into sight again the 
thirty- three starters had dwindled to five. 

People said: " Drifter's well ahead," and, indeed, 
as the horses poured past us again he swept over 
gorse and water with a grim determination that 
belied his name. 

By some trick of the eye I did not see Music Hall. 
The crimson jacket on Drifter filled my eyes, but 
a man near me said : " Music Hall has it ! " — and I 
suddenly knew that I wanted him to win. 

Off into the mist again they went, while unseated 
jockeys could be seen waddling back home along the 
grass. 

Once more the horses were lost to sight on their 
second round of the course. By the time they came 
into view again, mere shadows a mile away, the five 
seemed to have dwindled to two. It was clear that 
the race had become a duel. Music Hall and 
Drifter appeared to be winning and losing alter- 
nately, and when they sprang over the last jump 
they were almost neck to neck. Even when the 
last jump was over, and they were flying along the 
level green, an ignoramus such as I am could not 
have been sure which was going to win. 

But thousands of men and women were sure. 
They kept yelling "Music Hall! Music Hall!" 
— waving race-cards and hats at him to come on. 

And Music Hall came on. Under the white 
25 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

crescents in the mauve jersey of his rider he swung 
past the winning post amid the acclamation due to 
a conqueror — a winner who has made thousands of 
people his fellow- winners. 

Then the rain fell. It didn't pelt ; it simply fell. 

After a short conversation with a bookmaker I 
took my way homeward, quietly pringling with 
pleasure. I don't think it was the money, though 
I am fond of money ; it was simply honest pride. I 
felt extraordinarily wise — like Aristotle, or Plato, or 
Old Pizzey. 



26 



Ill 

THE LOVE OF MONEY 

THE love of money is the root of all evil. It 
makes men fat. It makes men thin. It 
makes them eat too much. It makes them 
eat too little. It makes them drink too much. It 
makes them teetotallers. It makes them marry. 
It makes them refrain from marrying. It makes 
them make war. It makes them make peace. It 
makes them reckless. It makes them mean. It 
makes them rich. It makes them poor. It makes 
them politicians. It makes them indifferent to 
politics. It makes them patriots. It makes them 
internationalists. It makes them judges. It makes 
them thieves. It makes them Harley Street 
specialists. It makes them nervous wrecks. It 
makes them archbishops. It makes them miserable 
sinners. It makes them money-lenders. It makes 
them victims of money-lenders. It makes them bet. 
It makes them afraid to bet. I might continue the 
catalogue so as to fill a book. There is almost 
nothing that men have not done or been for the love 
of money. But when we have gone through all the 
counts in the indictment, and weighed their relative 
importance, we are inevitably brought back to the 
27 



THE SPORTING IJFE 

first count as the worst count of all. The love of 
money is to be condemned for nothing more than for 
this. It makes men fat, and it makes them thin, 
but especially it makes them fat. 

I am sure you would have agreed with me if you 
had stayed in any of the big Liverpool hotels during 
the races. There was no smoking-room in which 
the chairs were not filled by men who were much 
fatter than they ought to have been. They had 
straight eyebrows. Their cheeks jutted out under 
their eyes in ledges of flesh, sometimes yellow and 
sometimes red. They were of all heights and 
breadths, but they had not a sunken stomach 
among them. They wore hats at every tilt except 
the right tilt. One of them kept altering the tilt of 
his incessantly as he spoke. When he leaned forward 
to begin, he would touch it under the brim with the 
top of his thumb, and it would slide on to the back 
of his skull. Having got the ear of his audience 
he would loll back, waving a chewed cigar between 
two unmistakable fingers, and then, as he made his 
point, would suddenly seize the hat in the rear and 
send it rolling nor'-nor'-west over his left brow, as 
much as to say : " What do you think of that ? " 
He had a gesture of the hat for every stage in the 
conversation. If anybody interrupted him he 
would take it off altogether, look at it critically with 
the cigar wedged in the far corner of his mouth, wipe 
it with his sleeve, dandle it up and down, and restore 
it to his head in a flash only when he saw a hole in 
28 



THE LOVE OF MONEY 

the conversation into which he could plunge, hat 
and all. Then once more he was all gay. He gave 
his hat a list to starboard. He tried it over each eye 
in turn. He boxed the compass with it. When he 
had said all he wanted to say he leaned back in his 
chair, holding his cigar as though to let you see 
that it was a cigar, and by some curious trick his 
hat seemed to walk up the back of his head of its own 
volition and to settle down over both his eyes. It 
was as if he had said : " Wake me up when the others 
have stopped talking." I had seen something like 
it on the stage, but this young man with the red, 
crushed and by no means inconsiderable nose was 
apparently a real person. He was not yet fat. At 
least, he was not so fat as his companions. But 
he will be some day, if he can survive an endless 
procession of bottled stout. 

As for the others, some of them were elderly, 
some of them were middle-aged, some of them 
were young, but they were all fat. They called each 
other " 'Arry," "Joey" and "Sam" (pronounced 
"Sem"). It was inconceivable that one of them 
should have addressed another as, say, " Robert." 
The table before them was laden with beer, stout, 
double Scotches, and glasses of port wine. And, all 
the time, they talked about money — money they 
had won, and money they had lost, on horses. 
" Sam ! " one of them, a big, short-necked man with 
a grizzled black moustache, would call across the 
table, interrupting a whispered duologue. " Sam ! " 
29 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

At the third repetition of his name, Sam would 
look up quickly. " Joey 'ere," the man with the 
moustache told him, " won't believe me about 
'ow you and I backed Old Junk at Newbury that 
day Pop Goes the Weasel lost the Cup by a 'ead." 
" It's as true as I'm 'ere," said Sam, nodding 
vigorously. " D'je 'ear that ? " cried the other, 
turning round on Joey in triumph ; "d'je 'ear 
that ? " Then he spread out his hands over the 
table, and leaned forward to address the entire com- 
pany. " I was feeling a bit cheap that morning," 
he began, " and me and Billy Ward were standing in 
the bar, splitting a bottle of fizz, when 'oo should 
come in but Sam 'ere. ' 'Ullo, Sam ! ' says I. 
' 'Ullo, 'Arry ! ' says Sam. ' Wot is it ? ' says I, 
touching my glass. ' No, wot's yours ? ' says Sam. 
' Look 'ere, Sam,' says I, ' p'raps you think I'm 
'avin' a drink. I'm not. This is medicine. Not 
another drop passes my lips till I see Old Junk 
romping 'ome in the Cup at twenty to one.' ' Go on,' 
says Sam, looking at me as if I had gone barmy. 
' Go on,' 'e says ; ' Old Junk 'as as much chance in a 
race with Pop Goes the Weasel as you 'ave.' ' Look 
'ere, Sam,' I said to him ; ' come back to the point. 
Old Junk's going to win. 'E's going to win. If 
you've got a better shirt than the one you're wearing, 
put it on him, and don't say I didn't tell you.' 
Then Sam began talking about form — you remember, 
Sam ? — and doing all 'e could to prove that Pop 
Goes the Weasel was an absolute cert. Djoo 
30 



THE LOVE OF MONEY 

remember wot my answer w^as, Sam ? ' To 'ell with 
form,' I said to Sam — didn't I, Sam ? — ' to 'ell with 
form. I was dreaming about pineapples all night.' 
Sam looked a bit queer at that. ' 'Ere,' 'e said, ' I 
must 'ave a drink. My 'ead feels swimmy.' ' Wait 
a bit,' I told him ; ' wait a bit, Sam, and tell me 'ow 
pineapples are gen' rally sold.' ' In tins,' says Sam, 
' but either I'm going mad or you are.' ' Think 
again, Sam,' I said ; ' 'ow are pineapples gen' rally 
sold ? I mean to say, 'ow d'je eat 'em ? ' ' 'Ow do I 
eat 'em ? ' says Sam ; ' I never do eat 'em ; but I 
s'pose you eat 'em like anything else — off plates.' 
' Don't be silly,' I said to him, ' you eat 'em in junks. 
Pineapple junks — does your missus never bring a 
tin 'ome for dinner ? ' ' Oh,' says Sam, beginning 
to catch the drift of wot I was saying, ' that's wot 
you're getting at. I know 'em. But you're all out, 
'Arry. It's not junks, it's chunks you're thinking 
about.' ' Chunks or junks, Sam,' says I, ' junks is 
good enough for me. I don't know 'ow much there 
is in dreams, but I never 'ad one like this before, and 
I know I'm going to 'ave a tenner on Old Junk after 
dreaming about all them pineapples.' ' There's no 
sense in it,' says Sam, shaking ' is ' ead. ' Look 'ere, 
Sam,' I said to 'im ; ' I'll tell you wot I'll do. I'll 
back my old pineapples against your sense for an 
even fiver.' But Sam wasn't ' aving any. ' 'Arry,' 
'e said, ' blowed if I 'aven't a sort of goosey feeling 
myself that Old Junk's going to win.' Well, you 
remember wot 'appened. ..." But there is really 

31 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

no need to continue. It was an exceedingly round- 
about story, the end of which was that Pop Goes the 
Weasel " fyled to pop," as 'Arry put it — in other 
words, failed to get away at the start — and that Old 
Junk did win a surprising victory, which put hun- 
dreds of pounds into the pockets of 'Arry and Sam. 

As one watched the faces round the table, one 
noticed that they all smirked with interest so long 
as conversation continued. But if there was a 
pause of silence they became vacuous, dull, bored. 
Then someone would break the horrid stillness with 
a question that brought all minds back to reviving 
thoughts about money : " Ask Joey ' ow much did 
'e 'ave on Trespasser yesterday." Joey blew out a 
long plume of smoke from his lungs. " A fiver." 
" Wot didja get ? " " Twos." Then from someone 
else : "I 'card you dropped fifty quid." " 'Oo 
toldja that ? " " 'Arry. It was you, 'Arry, told 
me Joey 'ad dropped fifty quid on the Liverpool, 
wasn't it ? " " Me ? I never said such a thing in 
my life." "Well, 'oo was it, then? Was it you. 
Bill ? " " You've been dreaming, Ted, like 'Arry 
and the pineapples." " Blest if I can think 'oo it 
was, but it was somebody I was ' aving a drink with 
last night in this very 'otel." " You must have been 
'earing as well as seeing double," Joey interrupted 
him ; "I 'aven't 'ad fifty quid on a horse since 
I backed Blue Dun in the Cesarewitch. Blimey, I 
never felt so sick in my life. You remember, 'Arry ? 
'Arry was blind-oh before 'e got on the train, and I 
32 



THE LOVE OF MONEY 

was nearly as bad. You remember the p'liceman 
outside Liverpool Street Station, 'Arry ? ' UUo,' 'e 
said, when 'e saw 'Arry and me 'olding each other up, 
' 'ullo,' 'e said, ' wot's the trouble ? ' 'Arry couldn't 
'ardly even 'iccough, but at last 'e made a sound 
that was more like ' Blue Dun ' than it was like 
anything else. Any'ow, the p'liceman understood 
wot 'e meant. ' Well,' 'e said, ' I can 'ardly blame 
you, gentlemen. I've been 'it myself.' . . ." But 
this story, too, does not bear telling in full. It 
ended with the policeman's assisting his fellow-losers 
into a cab, and with a vow on the part of Joey never 
to put fifty pounds on a horse again. 

All the stories were like this. All were far too 
long. All were full of masses of insignificant detail. 
All were about money, about tips, about odds — all 
except one, told by a Jew with a Glasgow accent, 
who tried to tell a bawdy story of which he had 
forgotten the point. As he rambled on, with his 
eyes twinkling round his nose, with a " D'ye see ? " 
here and a " D'ye see ? " there, the rest of the 
company began to talk in pairs, and you could hear 
the eternal series of questions going on — " Did you 
back anything in the last race ? " " What did 
Bruff Bridge start at ? " " Did you back it both 
ways ? " " 'Ow much did you drop on Arravale ? " 
" Did you do well at Lincoln ? " — with their eternally 
monotonous answers. Meanwhile, the Jew with 
the Glasgow accent went on cheerfully floundering 
through his story to one listener, who sat with a 
c 33 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

heavy, bored face, nodding at every place where he 
thought he was meant to see a point. But even he 
after a time ceased to listen, and turning to the man 
on his other side said : " You remember that old 
chap in the train 'oo was talking about Taffytus. I 
wonder did 'e back him for a place." " Sure to," 
said the other. The conversation had become vital 
again. . . . Meanwhile, this most interesting of the 
stars wheeled on its course round the most interesting 
of the suns. There was never such another star. 
Is it any wonder that we sat there, most of us fat, 
drinking double Scotches and bottled stout, and 
excited by strange dreams ? 



34 



IV 

SEEING THE BOAT RACE 

" TT is estimated," a poet who is good at statistics 
I said to me, " that a milUon people go to see the 

-JL boat race. That means one person in seven 
out of the population of London." 

It is certainly a momentous event. For one brief 
hour every year Oxford ceases to be merely the 
name of a Circus, and justifies its existence as a seat 
of learning by stirring our imaginations like a race- 
horse or a football club. Cambridge no longer de- 
pends for its fame on its sausages, but on its under- 
graduates, and Mr Hartley's smile becomes a more 
potent advertisement of the benefits of University 
education than the scholarship of a Verrall or a Sir 
John Sandys. 

Even so, there are people who say of the boat race, 
as Dr Johnson said of the Giant's Causeway, that it 
is worth seeing, but not worth going to see. But 
they go to see it every year all the same. They go 
to see it in such numbers that on the day of the 
race it was impossible to squeeze one's way into an 
Underground train at a station beyond Victoria. 

Every door of every carriage was held tight by 
crushed and nervous-looking persons, making 
35 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

signals of refusal with their mouths behind the glass 
to those who wished to enter. In the end, remember- 
ing the old adage that it is no use trying to squeeze a 
quart into a pint pot, I left the station and got into 
a taxi. 

Here, as we approached Hammersmith, there 
were other impeding crowds. The block of motors 
began to show signs of standing still, like the Derby 
Day procession on the Epsom road. My driver 
made the block doubly bad for a minute or two by 
insisting on turning back and making, by a more 
circuitous route, for the Duke's Meadows in Chis- 
wick. Thus I was beaten back from the river twice 
before I succeeded in reaching it. What is one 
against a million ? The million were wise ; they 
were there first. 

It was a grey day of east wind brightened by some 
tens of thousands of blue rosettes. There were blue 
ribbons on many of the motors. Numbers of young 
men wore in their hats or button-holes mascot- dolls 
with blue hair or blue ballet- skirts. The bird's-egg 
blue of Cambridge seemed to be more popular with 
the crowd and the crowd's children than the " deep- 
and-dark-blue- ocean " blue of Oxford. The drivers 
of laundry-carts whom one passed on the road 
with their beribanded whips were supporters of 
Cambridge to a man. 

The Duke's Meadows scarcely live up to their 
name. Even to call them the Duke's Back Yard 
would be a compliment. They are a piece of waste 
36 



SEEING THE BOAT RACE 

land used apparently as a dumping-ground for 
tarpaulin-covered crates. They have only one 
beauty : they are on the river. If they have 
another, it is that they are freely strewn with large 
stones or lumps of broken concrete. Here the 
Laestrygonians could have found ammunition 
enough to sink Ulysses and his men twenty times 
over. 

On Saturday the stones were put to a better use. 
Everybody who was not too lazy took up the biggest 
stone he could carry and made it a pedestal on the 
grassy edge of the river, from which he could see 
over the heads of the million other people present. 
Some of these pedestals were wobbly enough, but 
the crowd w^as so dense that no man could fall much 
farther than against his neighbour. 

It was a quiet crowd and inclined to be cheerless 
under the east wind. There were nigger minstrels 
at other points along the curves of the river — ^per- 
haps, even Punch and Judy shows. But here there 
was no holiday music save the melancholy sing-song 
of an unseen accordion on the other side of the river 
— the sing-song of an accordion played by a man 
who is content merely to make a noise without 
time or tune. There were also occasional bursts of 
delighted laughter from across the river as boys 
and girls attempted to climb a steep bank and fell 
sliding down the mud. 

But nobody appeared to be excited. Everybody 
knew what was going to happen. Even I knew. 

37 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

The man with the air of a bookmaker, who walked 
up and down behind the crowd, crying : " Two 
to one on Cambridge. I'll take two to one on 
Cambridge," knew. 

Beyond the meadows along the bank was a 
flagstaff-like affair with a long light blue drum or 
cylinder hanging near the top on one side. People 
said that this meant that Cambridge had won the 
toss. On a platform some yards away stood a man 
with a telephone at his ear and a megaphone in his 
hand. It was pleasant to know that, though one 
would not be able to see more than a few yards of 
the race, one would be able to follow it from start to 
finish with the aid of the telephone, the megaphone 
and the flagstaff. A few minutes later a second 
cylinder, a dark blue one, was hoisted on the flag- 
staff, where it hung side by side with the other, like 
the weights in a grandfather's clock. The prospect 
of a race between the cylinders — " those blue 
balloon things," as somebody called them in pointing 
them out — became almost exciting. 

There was a burst of sunshine from a blue dome of 
sky just before the race started, so that every little 
grey motor-boat that lay by the edge of the stream 
was reflected in the lighted surface of the rippled 
and muddy water, and the vermilion funnel of a 
steam-launch sent its vermilion ghost deep down 
into the river. To the east the sky was discoloured 
with the threat of foul weather, but overhead a lark 
was singing in the blue and gold. 

38 



SEEING THE BOAT RACE 

Suddenly there was a sound that might have been 
either a distant shot or the pop of the cork of a 
ginger-beer bottle. Someone said : " They're off." 
The crowd immediately turned its back on the 
starting-place and gazed expectantly at the blue 
cylinders. The dark blue cylinder fell for about a 
yard with a sickening thud. There was a roar of 
cheering mixed with laughter. 

Sometimes the dark blue cylinder would creep 
an inch, two inches, three inches, upwards, and there 
would be counter-cries of defiance and hope. At 
one moment it seemed as if it had actually got 
level again, but no sooner had the Oxford men on 
the banks begun to yell than the cylinder once more 
began to descend, like a man letting himself rapidly 
down a rope. 

Before long it had ceased to be more than an 
amusing spectacle. The Cambridge drum hung 
steadily at the top of the pole. The Oxford drum 
dangled like a guy — up and down, but mostly down. 
If it crept upwards a lady with Cambridge sym- 
pathies would say : " It's going to be a race after 
all. I'm glad it won't be only a procession." 

But the drum would fall a length a minute after- 
wards and no one above school age could any longer 
believe that there was the slightest chance that 
Oxford would win. The crowds became silent ; 
the sky to the east became duller. All one wished 
was that the boats would hurry up so that one 
could have a minute's look at them and go home. 

39 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

After a considerable wait one could hear the cheer 
coming up the river. It grew from a husky far- 
away cry till it became a roar that seemed to be a 
part of the energy of the straining crews. It was im- 
possible not to feel the infection of the excitement, 
and people now were standing on their toes, with 
their hats off, in order to catch the first glimpse of 
the boats as they swept round the bend in the river. 

But it was more exciting to expect than to see 
them. Cambridge was not only leading : it was 
resting. The little motor-boats and the larger 
launch that tore up the river in the rear of the boats 
seemed perturbed in their haste compared to the 
white oarsmen who moved with as calm and even 
a rhythm as the rhymed couplets of Pope. 

The calm of the Cambridge men, however, was the 
calm of men who need do no more. The quiet of the 
Oxford men was the quiet of men who could do no 
more. 

As they neared the end of the race the Cambridge 
crew seemed to take it into their heads not only to 
win, but to win handsomely. The men began to 
pull with a larger, swifter sweep and to earn the 
cheers that followed them in a storm along the river. 

Then they passed out of sight, and the dark blue 
drum began falling further down the side of the pole. 

A minute or two more, and the rope that held it 
loosened and let it fall till it could fall no further. 
Cambridge had won, and little boys were cheering 
with delight. 

40 



SEEING THE BOAT RACE 

One sandy-haired boy in spectacles took the other 
side. " Cambridge number five had no puff left," he 
declared, " when he was passing us." " Cambridge 
won, Cambridge won," a four-foot member of the 
other party jeered at him. " Oxford did their best 
anyhow," the sandy-haired boy declared stubbornly, 
" you can't deny that." And he couldn't. 

As the motors and taxis made their way back 
through the side streets the little boys and girls who 
had been playing on the pavements stood on the 
kerbs with their pale blue rosettes and cheered them 
or mocked them according to the mascots or ribbons 
that decorated them. They would go out into the 
road to scream : " Good old Cym-breedge ! Good 
old Cymbreedge 1 " at a motor festooned with light 
blue ribbons, and when a motor with a dark blue 
doll would pass they would yell : " Tyke it off ! 
Tyke it off I " till they were red in the face. 

Cambridge, it seems, is popular in Chiswick. 
Some of those little boys and girls must have been 
quite hoarse as a result of the insults they hurled 
at the Universitv of Oxford. 



41 



V 
WHAT A NIGHT'S BOXING IS LIKE 

YOU haven't the shghtest idea what a great 
boxing match looks Uke, now that it takes 
place in a special sort of light in order that 
it may be photographed for the picture theatres. 
The ring under its roof of lamps look partly like a 
billiard table. It looks still more like the stage just 
before the ghost in Hamlet appears. 

You could not imagine a more eerie and lavender 
light. If it were freezing in Elsinore, and not a 
mouse stirring, it could scarcely produce a more 
moonstruck or ghostly atmosphere than the shaded 
lamps threw down on the little platform in the 
middle of the Albert Hall when Cook, the Australian, 
and Carpentier met to decide who was the second- 
best man on this small and ridiculous planet. 

The assembly, I confess, was not worthy of the 
occasion. I had hoped to find the hall crowded 
with women with the eyes and the claws of tigers. 
On the contrary, it was cranmied for the most part 
with all sorts of men, many of them in evening dress, 
and all of them smoking, as if they were in a music 
hall. 

The evening began To tell you the truth, I 

42 



WHAT A NIGHT'S BOXING IS LIKE 

do not know how it began. I arrived only in time 
for a contest of ten three-minute rounds between 
Paul Fritsch, the amateur feather-weight champion 
of the world, and Tibby Watson, who was described 
on the programme as " the rugged Australian 
feather-weight." 

PaTil bounced round the stage like an india-rubber 
ball, watching Tibby out of the corner of his eyes. 
Tibby, whose pale hair fell over his brow like that of 
a man of the Stone Age, had a special genius for 
ducking his head just as Paul swung his black glove, 
like the right word, towards the mortal part of his 
jaw. 

Paul bled Tibby's nose, and, having bled his nose, 
dipped his glove in the red paint and dappled the 
stains of it over Tibby's body. Then Tibby bled 
Paul's nose — or was it his ear ? Undismayed, Paul 
went on dancing about in the ghastly light, and, 
though Tibby rushed at him and rescued his Stone 
Age head from blow after blow, Paul in the end was 
declared to have won on points. 

Then came another ten-round contest, between 
Marcel Nilles, heavy-weight champion of France, 
and Guardsman Pemvill, heavy-weight champion of 
the Army and Navy. This was more like wrestling 
than boxing. 

It was not long before the Englishman's blood- 
stained tongue was lolling out of his blood-stained 
mouth. But, for the most part, the two naked men 
were swinging to and fro, the head of each bowed on the 
43 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

other's shoulder, and black fists punching vainly at 
occiputs, ribs and shoulder-blades, while the referee 
at minute intervals cried " Break ! " — at which they 
swung loose and hopped round each other like 
elephantine fleas. 

I heard a lady behind me, as the fighters were 
separated for the hundredth time, saying : " Doesn't 
boxing always make you think of Tennyson's 
beautiful line, ' Break, break, break ' ? " The man 
beside her was in angry mood. He said: "Why 
doesn't Penwill stand up to him ? There hasn't 
been a single blow struck yet." 

I confess I sympathised with Penwill. He had 
either to embrace a fellow- creature who was per- 
spiring profusely, or to accept a wild rout of French 
epigrams on his jaws and between his eyes. He 
chose the better part. 

But all this was not quite real. Nobody worried 
about it, except the naked men who were fighting 
and the assistants in sweaters and cricket clothes 
who waved towels at them and sponged their 
solar plexuses with water at the end of every 
round. 

The most interesting thing that happened during 
these early fights was the entrance of Mr Bernard 
Shaw, the saint of pugilism, with a white beard. 
Yet nobody noticed him. It seemed to me an 
extraordinary thing that here was the Albert Hall 
filled with people, who were paying anything from a 
guinea to twelve guineas for a seat, and yet, if Mr 

44 



WHAT A NIGHT'S BOXING IS LIKE 

Shaw and Mr Wells had been meeting in the ring 
for an argument on the destiny of mankind at the 
the same prices, the hall would have been three- 
quarters empty. 

Suddenly the place became alive. It was as 
though the tide that had been at an ebb a few 
minutes before was miraculously at the full. A 
huge Australian doll, that was like a mixture of a 
teddy-bear and an opossum and a cassowary in a 
blaze of coloured ribbons, was hoisted on high at 
one corner of the ring. White men in sweaters, 
with kangaroos and emus worked on their chests, 
started to life near it. 

George Cook, the bear, the lion, the Caliban of the 
ring, sank into a chair beside it. 

Every gallery in the hall became a perch of 
monstrous singing-birds crying : " Coo-oo-ee ! " The 
ring itself was crowded with men in evening dress, 
men in cricket costume, men in no costume that 
can be described. One of the men in evening dress 
appealed to us not to smoke and not to make 
remarks. Another in evening dress said the same 
thing in French. We applauded both and went on 
smoking. 

Carpentier then leaped up on the stage in a dark 
grey dressing-gown. With his fair hair brushed 
straight back from his brow, he looked like the god 
Mercury, or a character from Shakespeare. One 
expected him, as soon as the applause had ceased, 
to begin in blank verse : " 'Tis not alone my 

45 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

inky cloak, good mother," or something of the 
kind. 

Instead of doing this, he ambled round the stage, 
while his friends bound his hands in surgical linen, 
and every now and then he had a draught of 
water out of a green bottle, after which he went 
over to the corner of the stage and spat into a 
bucket. 

Meanwhile, another accomplice held a wet com- 
press to the back of his neck to thrill coolness down 
his spine. Cook, his maroon jacket hanging over 
one shoulder, shook hands with him. 

At a bark from the referee, the ring cleared. 
White men, buckets and all, dropped into the body 
of the hall. 

Cook came on like a bull. Carpentier faced him 
like a young Bensonian actor who had fine lines to 
speak. Cook rushed at him, his mouth slewed up 
his face, as though he were determined to finish an 
international war in five minutes. 

Carpentier looked indifferent. One thought of 
Gerald du Maurier suddenly attacked by Billy 
Merson. 

Cook rushed at him, grappled, pounded the sides 
of his head. 

Carpentier looked over Cook's shoulder at the 
referee in rather a bored way. 

The referee cried " Break ! " 

Cook was deaf to all cries, seeing red, white and 
blue, and any other colour there was, till the referee 

46 



WHAT A NIGHT'S BOXING IS LIKE 

seized both fighters by the sweating shoulders and 
forced himself between them. 

At the end of this round the galleries were once 
more perches of singing-birds, crying " Coo-oo-ee ! " 

In the second round, too, the rush was Cook's, and 
a character from Shakespeare, lean, melancholic 
and auto-psycho-analytic, seemed to be defending 
himself. 

The boots of the fighters, as they dodged each 
other, squeaked in the intense silence of the hall 
like the boots of Presbyterian elders. 

The referee hopped about like a bear on a gridiron, 
watching for foul blows, and tore the fighters asunder 
again and again. Again and again Carpentier 
seemed to be beaten to the ropes. 

But always he looked wearily over Cook's 
shoulder to the referee, and the referee cried: 
" Break ! " 

The third round — well, I was rather bewildered 
after that. Carpentier seemed suddenly to grow 
angry, alert, inevitable. He was no longer bored. 
He crouched. He was feline. 

His hair ceased to be smooth. It jumped up and 
down on his head. And by now Cook was dodging 
and ducking. The lithe arm was mastering the 
powerful arm. Art was defeating Nature. 

Again and again the fighters became locked, 

punching at the heart, at the back ribs, at the side 

of the head, with their black gloves. The referee 

found it more and more difficult to tear the leonine 

47 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Cook from his prey. You felt that Cook was as 
wild with the passion of the fight as though he were 
seeing red in a war. 

But Carpentier never forgot. He remained col- 
lected, self-conscious, proud. 

As for the fourth round, the end came too suddenly 
for a layman to know what had happened. They 
say that Carpentier was not in form, but to me he 
seemed to spring at Cook like a cat at a bird. 

Suddenly, after a slinging and walloping of the 
gloves that echoed through the hall, he had Cook 
falling. 

He struck him again as he fell. At least, I 
suppose that is what happened. 

A little man jumped up in the body of the hall 

and began to count — " One, two, three " You 

could not hear the counting for the shouting. 

Cook rolled on the ground like a shot lion. Like 
a wounded lion he attempted to stagger to his feet. 
He could not stagger in time. 

Hardly had the ten been counted when, with the 
effort of a monster, he once more rose into an erect 
man. But it was too late. 

Sweating, broken, he struck his glove into 
Carpentier's as a defeated sportsman does. 

Some of the crowd began crying : " Foul ! " 

There were scenes, during which little men in 
evening dress and little men in white sweaters tried 
to explain that it was all right. 

Carpentier had won. 

48 



WHAT A NIGHT'S BOXING IS LIKE 

It was a beautiful spectacle, except for some of 
those who had seen Carpentier before. They said 
it was a " wash-out," and that Carpentier was not 
the man he used to be. Others, equally authorita- 
tive, declared that never before had he shown 
himself to be so great an artist. 



49 



VI 
TEST MATCHES 

Gregory's attack at trent bridge 

THE Trent Bridge ground, where the hun- 
dredth Test Match between England and 
AustraUa was played, looks like a bungling 
attempt to make a square of a circle or, alternatively, 
to make a circle of a square. 

It looked utterly dismal on Saturday. Possibly 
the crowd anticipated defeat, possibly it anticipated 
rain. It came in overcoats, and looked for that 
reason more like a football crowd than a cricket 
crowd. 

It may be that straw hats are no longer worn. 
Certainly nobody but a few eccentrics wore them at 
Trent Bridge. 

Thousands of people were sitting on the grass in 
front of the stands and the seats as on a spring day. 
But they sat on waterproofs and newspapers. 

They were a quiet crowd — so quiet, even in their 
conversation, that you could hear a chaffinch 
singing in the elm that hangs like a green cloud over 
one of the stands. If any man made a joke to his 
neighbour a thousand people could hear it in the 
heavy stillness. 

50 



TEST MATCHES 

"Ah'm surprised that so o'dld a man as you 
should be so frivolous," was one remark called, 
hand beside mouth, across the stand to a distant 
friend. I did not see the " oald man," and could 
only guess in what respect he had proved so frivolous, 
but the remark at least stirred one's mind with the 
image of a lesser Falstaff of the Midlands, and so 
helped to keep one from being put to sleep, as one 
might otherwise have been, by the spectacle of four 
or five sleepy men slowly pushing a roller, with 
another sleepy man sitting on it, backwards and 
forwards on the pitch. 

There can be nothing more somnolent than the 
preliminaries of cricket. One would imagine from 
the care that is taken of the ground that it was 
a sick-room, or at least a room being prepared for 
the reception of invalids. One is surprised that 
the umpires, when they come out, do not walk on 
tiptoe. 

The creases are kept protected from the least drop 
of rain by umbrella-like things on wheels. At last 
these are trundled off the field, looking like retreat- 
ing insects ; the ropes are removed ; the pitch is 
measured ; the stumps and the bails fixed by the 
umpires. 

Then at long last, a sight for sleepy eyes, down 
the pavilion steps comes a waterfall of white figures. 
It is the Australian eleven coming out to field. 

The cricket on Saturday was sensational in so far 
as it is possible to be sensational without being very 
51 



THE SPORTING IJFE 

exciting. It was like a humdrum, unadventurous 
story with some desperately exciting paragraphs. 

It was the bowlers and the fielders, not the bats- 
men, who provided such excitement as there was. 
They were much too exciting, it seemed, for the 
batsmen. Gregory and Macdonald are both tall 
men with an immense swing of arm, who can hurl 
a ball as though they were bomb-throwing. 

When Tyldesley came on to bat, in succession to 
Knight, on the English side he stood at the wicket 
merely for a second like an uneasy question-mark, 
and, when he was bowled first ball by Gregory, he 
seemed still to be asking bewildered questions. He 
looked at the sky ; he looked at his legs ; he looked at 
the wicket. He knew that something queer had hap- 
pened, but he did not know how it had happened. 

Then came Hendren with his famous waddle — 
the waddle of a man who fears no foe, and who looks 
as likely to score a century when all is disaster as in 
the hour of victory. 

Gregory walked back twenty yards, turned, ran a 
few steps, changed his step, leaped on with longer 
strides, and just as he reached the wicket, with arm 
swinging and head tilted suddenly north-north-west, 
let fly one of those deadly balls that might either 
shoot along the grass like a snake or strike the 
ground and bound over the wicket, over the wicket- 
keeper, over the moon. 

Hendren watched him doing this, I think, three 
times. He watched him, like an amazed child 
52 



TEST MATCHES 

watching fireworks. The third time the ball tore 
one of his stumps up by the roots and sent it 
somersaulting over the grass towards the distant 
wicket-keeper. 

It was so catastrophic that it was comic. People 
had to laugh. Three wickets for 18 runs for an 
all-England team was a paradox too startling to be 
treated seriously. 

Douglas then took Hendren's place— Douglas, 
whose initials, J. W. H. T., are said to have been 
taken to signify " Johnny Won't Hit To-day " 
during a tour in Australia. But, indeed, Johnnie 
hit all a man could in the circumstances. He looked 
a little lazy and stiff as he walked to the wicket, but 
he immediately began to play with the air of a man 
who felt that he and not the bowler was master of 
the situation. 

The spectators no longer uttered subdued whistles 
of awe or drew in their breaths at narrow shave after 
narrow shave as the terrible bombing of the wickets 
went on. Douglas, they felt, was bomb-proof. 
The bombs even glanced gracefully from his bat at 
times, and there was neither stiffness nor laziness in 
his figure when there was a chance of stealing a run. 

Nor was it one of the bombs that caught him at 
last. He fell a victim rather to the wiles of the 
gigantic Armstrong. 

Armstrong is a giant of whom it has been said 
that his thighs are as high as other men's shoulders. 
Yet, with all his nineteen stone of weight, he is light 
53 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

enough on his feet. He bowls rather hke a fat 
uncle — not altogether unlike a fat aunt. He comes 
sailing along towards the wicket, holding the ball 
over his stomach with both hands as he runs. He 
did not put all his nineteen stone into the ball, and 
any nephew would have taken the hardest possible 
whack at it. Douglas did, and missed, save with the 
very edge of his bat, and he was caught by Gregory 
in the slips before he quite realised that Armstrong 
had bowled like that on purpose. 

Holmes, meanwhile, who had been batting from 
the beginning, was going on scoring while everybody 
else's wicket was falling. He batted rather like a 
fencer. A snapshotter could have caught him in 
many of the attitudes of a fencer on guard. 

When Woolley, lean and high- shouldered, came 
out to join him, there also came a cloud out of a 
pavilion of clouds, which paused over the ground, 
and began to empty itself on the grass as one might 
empty a watering-can. 

The cricketers looked at it as if in terror. The 
batsmen looked at it, the bowlers looked at it, the 
fielders looked at it, the umpires looked at it. Then, 
without waiting for the over to be finished, they 
bolted for the pavilion like one man. It was as if 
their doctors had warned them that a single drop of 
rain might prove fatal. 

The attendants then hurried out the pent-houses 
on wheels to protect the crease, and bucketfuls of 
sawdust for the bowlers when they should return. 
54 



TEST MATCHES 

The sun was shining for a considerable time before 
the cricketers would venture out again. At last, 
the pent-houses were rolled away, and the umpires 
in their white coats appeared on the empty field, 
like the priests in some curious Chinese ritual. 
Hardly, however, had Macdonald begun to bowl 
when another black cloud came, as if deliberately, 
and hung over the ground, like a watering-can in 
the hands of a gardener. 

Once more the players were like savages in the 
presence of an eclipse. A helter-skelter of white 
limbs, they ran to the pavilion, while the spectators 
pursued them with taunts about umbrellas and 
derisive laughter. Ultimately there was no more 
water left in the cloud, and Armstrong and Douglas 
ventured out to see if it was all right. 

They decided that it was ; and then the two 
Chinese priests came forth again, and the waterfall 
of white figures poured down the pavilion steps, 
followed after a time by the two batsmen, in armour 
of glove and pad. 

But though the rot might be stayed, it could not 
be stopped. Five wickets were down for 77 — six for 
78. 

Rhodes looked for a time as though he were going 
to treat the bowling of Gregory and Macdonald 
like anybody else's bowling ; but, whether it was the 
pace, or the queer mixture of leaden and golden 
light, or the condition of the ground, he, too, seemed 
unable to follow the ball with his eye, and it was 
55 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

shooting past him and over his head in the most 
bewildering fashion. After one ball, he took off his 
cap to look at it. The peak had been shot off by 
the ball. 

Experts, I understand, do not admit that really- 
fast bowling exists nowadays. It may be so. I am 
content to use some milder adjective about Gregory's 
bowling — say " Terrific." 

Even when the batsmen struck the ball, it seemed 
all but impossible to get past the fielders. There 
was not a man in the Australian eleven who could 
not have caught a flash of lightning in one hand. 
They were men, as someone said, who always ran 
where the ball was going even before the batsman 
had hit it. 

There may have been six runs added to the score 
through the failure of fielders to do the impossible. 
There were not more. 

Rhodes and Jupp were both out with the score a 
little above a hundred. Nothing remained but the 
tail. Strudwick stood his ground heroically and 
made passes with his bat, but at the end of every 
ball he looked as if he did not know whether he 
was out or had hit the ball to the boundary. His 
bewilderment amused the crowd, who laughed and 
cheered enthusiastically. 

His wicket fell, and Richmond came on as last 

man. He is, they say, popular as a humorist, and, 

being the only Notts man in the team, he was the 

local hero of the day. He was cheered on his 

56 



TEST MATCHES 

entrance as though he had been the shade of W. G. 
Grace. 

He batted more Uke a schoolboy than hke W. G. 
Grace. He slogged out at Gregory for one glorious 
second, lifted the ball into the air as the ball (I am 
afraid) is never lifted in first-class cricket nowadays, 
and landed it over the boundary for 4. 

The crowd cheered again and again — the loudest 
cheer of the day. Gregory bowled again. Rich- 
mond once more hit out as though he had nine lives 
before him. But Gregory's eye was swifter than 
the ball, and, rushing forward, he put an end to 
Richmond's brief spell of glory with the most 
brilliant catch of the day. 

England, with a total of 112, had failed disas- 
trously. "I never dreamt of this," said a man 
beside me, with a helpless smile. He treated it as 
something incredibly absurd. 

Nor did matters improve when Australia came on 
to bat. The Australians, unlike the English bats- 
men, were not men attacked by demons. Collins 
and Bardsley w^ere unperturbed by the English 
bowling, which did not seem to be nearly so deadly 
as the fielding. 

Bardsley, lean and left-handed, had an uncanny 
gift for outwitting even the fielders, and for darting 
the ball through every chink or opening in the field. 

When Macartney joined him, and began to score 
with the very first ball, most people had a feeling that 
the Australian score was going to be a huge one, and, 

57 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

when Macartney was just afterwards given out leg 
before wicket, the crowd expressed its rehef in a 
loud cheer. It had already been annoyed by the 
refusal of the umpire to admit that Bardsley was 
" run out." One man near me yelled hoarsely : 
" He was run out by four yards ! " The exaggeration 
was so gross that it raised people's spirits again. 

On the whole, it was an interesting, boring, 
amusing, tedious, sensational and dull day's 
cricket. 



58 



VII 
TEST MATCHES 

THE CROWD " BARRACKS " 

THERE were far more people present at 
Trent Bridge for the second day of the 
match than on Saturday. The five- 
shilHng crowd did not at first overflow on to 
the grass as on Saturday, but that was because 
it was not allowed. The half-crown spectators, 
however, were sitting on the grass by the thousand, 
and hundreds sat on the slopes of the roofs. 

The Australians were all out by twenty past 
twelve for about twice the English score. 

Gregory was immediately put on to bowl, and 
Knight was cheered enthusiastically because he 
scored from the first ball. 

Gregory, indeed, turned out to be, not a demon, 
but a man, in these early overs, though he swung his 
arms and jerked his shoulders about before bowling 
as though he were trying to loosen imprisoned forces. 

Macdonald seemed to-day to bowl with greater 
vehemence, and Holmes, as he stood up to him, was 
constantly disturbed by balls that glanced off his 
elbow, or wounded him above the knee, or shot up 
along his bat and down among his shoes. 

59 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Macartney was then put on to bowl instead of 
Gregory, in the hope of gaining by gentleness what 
could not be got by violence. 

Macartney is a small man, who runs slowly up to 
the wicket, his right hand giving the ball to his left 
as he runs. He sends the ball up in the easy-going 
manner of a player at a practice net, on whose play 
little or nothing depends. He bowls the sort of ball, 
indeed, that as a boy one dreams of meeting half-way 
up the pitch and lifting out of the ground for 6. 

I do not think, all the same, that a single boundary 
was hit before luncheon. The Australians at times 
had to try twice before they were able to stop the 
ball, but they never failed to stop it. Taylor 
caught Holmes out at 7, by making a desperate 
spring at the ball, at the end of which he was rolling 
over and over with it on the grass, as though he had 
been playing Rugby football. 

The next misfortunes that befell the English 
eleven were the results not of play but of accident. 
Gregory came on to bowl once more ; this time at 
the pavilion end, and hurled himself into the air in 
his determination to repeat the terror of Saturday. 

Unhappily, the ball, as it bounded fiercely from 
the pitch, caught Tyldesley on the head, so that he 
fell on the ground, and rolled over in agony, while 
the ball ran on to his wicket and shook the leg bail 
on to the grass. He was supported on his way to the 
pavilion by a doctor, while one of the Australian 
fielders followed with his bat. 
60 



TEST MATCHES 

Hendren took the place of the wounded batsman, 
and provided comic reHef as he walked to and fro 
on the pitch, patting it here and there, and then 
turning back for another caress just as you thought 
he was finished and should be getting ready to bat. 

Not a blade of grass seemed to escape him. He 
had the eye of a hen as it picks up odds and ends of 
things in a farmyard where there is nothing to pick 
up. 

Unhappily there was more prologue than play in 
his day's work, though he had a pleasant, lively way 
of stealing hairbreadth runs with Knight. This was 
in the end Knight's undoing. Knight had blocked 
a ball, and as it lay a few yards up the pitch, out of 
reach of any fielder, he and Hendren began to run. 
They hesitated, with a " Yes — no," began to run, 
lost their heads, and Knight had to run back to his 
wicket. 

He reached it too late. The ball was there first. 
Hendren flung his bat on the ground in rage and 
disgust. He clearly thought it was his fault. In- 
deed, he is at times inclined, like a fox, to overreach 
himself. 

Knight was a serious loss ; not that he was 
batting superbly, but that he was batting securely. 

Meanwhile, the crowd was getting exasperated, 
partly by the slowness of the scoring and partly 
by the fierce, bounding onslaught of Gregory. It 
was evident that they blamed him for Tyldesley's 
wound. 

6i 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

There were jeers and cheers from a section of the 
spectators, which in AustraHa would be described 
as barracking. A man near me said : " They'll put 
the bowlers off. No bowlers could stand that ! " — 
and within five minutes of his having spoken Gregory- 
was seen putting on his sweater, with its green and 
yellow collar-band, and there was a good deal of 
cheering and chuckling at this sign that he was going 
to dwindle into a comparatively innocuous fielder 
again. 

Macdonald, and not he, however, was the supreme 
bowler of the day. His bowling was almost as 
remarkable as Pellew's fielding. Nothing else, how- 
ever, could be quite so remarkable as that. Had 
Pellew as many arms as Briareus, and twenty times 
as many legs as the figure that symbolises the Isle 
of Man, he could not have been in more places at 
once, or a more impassable guardian of the boundary. 

When Hendren and Douglas were both clean 
bowled by Macdonald, it looked as though the second 
day's play were going to be as disastrous for England 
as Saturday's. On Saturday England had lost five 
wickets for 77. To-day she had lost (including 
Tyldesley) five wickets for 76. 

It was when Jupp joined Woolley that what 
looked like being the great stand of the day took 
place, and just before tea Woolley had restored 
cricket to the ancient heroic level by driving a ball 
of Armstrong's at a star and sending it out over the 
ropes for 6. 

62 



TEST MATCHES 

Gregory by tliis time had resumed bowling, much 
to the indignation of some of the spectators, who 
began shouting " No ball ! " and other taunts at 
every ball he bowled. And he certainly bowled 
them red-hot. 

Jupp did his best to dodge — to save his throat, 
his arms, his thighs. When the time for tea came 
round Gregory put on his sweater again and the 
" barrackers " rejoiced, imagining that they had for 
the second time won a victory. But Gregory was 
only going off with the others for a cup of tea. 

No sooner was he back again, with Jupp doing 
his best to hit out, than Pellew, as ever, was in 
the way, and Jupp was caught out and on his way 
back to the pavilion for what sportsmen call a 
" praiseworthy 15." 

What one especially liked about Woolley was 
that he was the only batsman on the field in whose 
hands the bat seemed really to deserve to be called 
" the willow." It was during the partnership of 
Woolley and Rhodes that the score mounted to the 
point at which a defeat by an innings was made 
impossible. 

It was during the same partnership that a tea-room 
attendant came into the stand looking for lost cups. 

" A 'undred cups out," she announced indignantly 
to the doorkeeper of the stand. 

" Why don't you go among the people and sing 
out ? " he asked her. 

" Sing out ? " she echoed him. " If you speak 

63 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

to them, they won't answer you. They're not 
civiUsed." 

She said it with a sniff of such fervour that there 
was nothing for the barbarians she denounced to do 
but laugh. 

The laugh had hardly died into a smile when 
Woolley was caught at the wicket for 34, leaving 
the score at 138 for seven wickets. 

Strudwick followed, and a roar of amusement 
went round when Hendry's very first ball beat his 
wicket to an angle of 60 degrees. 

When Rhodes was caught at the wicket for 10, 
nothing could have saved England from defeat 
except an immediate rainstorm that would have 
lasted a little over twenty-four hours. 

People had been saying : " No one's batting 
better than the old man." But the " old man " was 
helpless before Macdonald and Hendry. And what 
could the tail of the team do where the " old man " 
was helpless ? The whole English team was out 
before a quarter to six, leaving the Australians with 
as many runs to get to win as you could count on the 
fingers of a large hand. 

" They'll beat any team that England can put 
in the field," was the general comment. " They're 
altogether too smart." 

Little Macartney struck out masterfully for 
Australia. Unlike Woolley in most respects, he 
was like him in this, that his bat seemed to be a 
part of him. 

64 



TEST MATCHES 

In a few seconds came the winning " boundary." 
And so an amazing match came to an end in two 
days with a Httle of the mildest of mild applause, 
the thronging of the crowd on the field, and the 
rueful, amused remark, " I want my money back," 
from people who had paid in advance for three days' 
cricket. Then the sun shone out more brightly 
and the people scattered homewards, tired, a little 
shocked, and voracious for a square meal. 



65 



VIII 
TEST MATCHES 

DISGRACEFUL SCENES AT LORd's 

DISGRACEFUL scenes at Lord's." That 
is the only heading that could do justice 
to the feelings of thousands of men and 
women who had bought tickets for the second Test 
Match, and who were still attempting to blaspheme 
their way into the ground nearly an hour after play 
had begun. 

It was not the players, or the public, or the police 
who behaved disgracefully : it was the authorities at 
Lord's. 

They had sold thousands of reserved seats, but 
had made no arrangements for admitting ticket- 
holders or for informing them where they could be 
admitted. They seemed to have kept the secret 
even from the police, who were as much at sea as 
anyone else. 

I saw one old gentleman, with field-glasses slung 
round his shoulder, go up to a policeman in the 
crush and, holding out his ticket, ask : " Where 
do I get in with this ? " " Nowhere," replied the 
policeman, with the wild smile of a man reduced 
to desperation. It was very nearly the truth. 
66 



TEST MATCHES 

I arrived an hour early and was sent to the far 
end of a queue that appeared to be about a quarter 
of a mile long. One could amuse oneself by sub- 
scribing to a flag-day, or buying from hawkers 
souvenirs in the shape of a small cricket ball with 
a photograph of an Australian player let into it, 
or being deafened by a lean man who came up and 
whittled close into one's face with one of those 
distressing inventions that are supposed to imitate 
the songs of birds, or watching the Chu Chin Chow 
camels parading by, like turkeys that had tried to 
be born as horses, or listening to the endless chatter 
of men who explained that Douglas was a fine 
cricketer, but a bad captain, and who talked of 
English batsmen generally as though they were a 
lot of shivering schoolboys waiting to be caned by 
Mr Squeers. 

After about an hour the rumour rippled along the 
queue that the ground was full except for ticket- 
holders. This meant the dropping away of some 
thousands of people. 

The queue then advanced more rapidly, till when it 
was just within sight of the turnstile it was attacked 
on the flank by a rush and crossfire of persons who 
had the red tickets of members of Lord's. 

To make things worse, a horse-policeman forced 
his way in and broke the queue up, and it in its turn 
became a mob. It gathered round the turnstile, 
while hundreds of people stretched their arms 
into the air, holding up their tickets, and yelling: 
67 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

" Ticket-holders ! Where do ticket-holders get 
in?" 

It was a patient crowd, but the language was on 
the strong side. Ladies contented themselves with 
" What the devils ! " and " Gracious heavenses ! " 
as the sun beat down on their delicate faces. Men 
thundered in growls, followed by vivid flashes. 

Every now and then an elderly gentleman or a 
lady and her daughter would have to beat a way 
back out of the crowd in order to escape fainting. 
In any other country, or among the devotees of any 
other game, there would have been a riot. A man 
beside me said viciously : "A football crowd would 
have had the gates down." 

Meanwhile, people in front were getting in at what 
seemed to be the rate of about one a minute. A 
cynical lady said that it was like a rich man trying 
to get through the eye of a needle. It was evident 
that they were examining every ticket-holder's pass- 
port and searching him for arms before admitting 
him. 

New-comers would arrive and say to us, politely 
and hopefully : " Would you mind letting us past ? 
We've got tickets." There would be a bitter and 
universal shout of " We've all got tickets ! " 

After a time a merry-looking man looked out at 
us from a window in the back of one of the stands, 
and, framed in ivy, shouted out : " England 58 for 
no wickets ! " It was not true (as we afterwards 
discovered), but it cheered the crowd up. 
68 



TEST MATCHES 

Then King George arrived, and the gates opened 
and shut for him as if by magic. 

After that a horse-poUceman told us to Hne 
up against the wall in a queue. We did so, and 
sweltered in the sun for a little longer. Then he 
came and told us to go and form a queue at another 
gate. " Queueriouser and queueriouser I " a punster 
in the crowd relieved his feelings by muttering. 
And even that wasn't the end of it, for one ultimately 
had to leave this for yet another queue at right 
angles to the wall, which crept into the ground 
between two banks of policemen, feeling somewhat 
like Swinburne's "weariest river" that "winds 
somewhere safe to sea." 

But when once you were inside the ground ! Is 
there a more beautiful view in England, I wonder, 
than the view you get from one of the stands in 
Lord's on a fine day ? There is the green and white 
of the field — as restful as a daisy field in Chaucer. 
But there is also at Lord's a noble and multiple 
idleness that takes the imagination, not to Chaucer, 
but to the South Seas. 

It is a ground that one almost expects to be sur- 
rounded by palm-trees, and, surely, if one were on 
the roof of the pavilion, one ought to have a view 
of a blue lagoon and a distant reef keeping out the 
noise and strife of breakers. 

Woolley and Douglas were batting for England 
by the time I arrived in my seat. Armstrong was 
running up to the wicket, like the world nicely 

69 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

balanced on two legs, and sending up those enticing 
balls that one could play so beautifully with a tennis 
racquet. 

Gregory bowled from the other end with the 
dangerous spring that had at Nottingham been like 
the wielding of a tomahawk. But the grass did not 
conspire with him at Lord's as it did at Nottingham. 
The ball flew fast as ever from his hand, but it did 
not explode on touching the ground. 

At the same time, Gregory displayed the character 
of a great cricketer. He is the most prehensile of 
fielders. He gives the impression of being a man 
who can catch the ball either with his hands or his 
feet. When the wicket-keeper returns the ball to 
him he walks impatiently away from it, and the ball 
finds its way into his hand seemingly by magnetism. 

WooUey and Douglas, however, were a match 
for any bowling that was attempted against them. 
They could not, perhaps, do what they liked with it, 
but neither could it do what it liked with them. 

WooUey had struck me at Nottingham as being 
the nearest thing to a great artist in the English 
team. At Lord's he proved himself to be something 
even nearer a great artist than at Nottingham. He 
is a lean man whose image you could make out of the 
contents of a box of matches : his legs are matches ; 
his arms are matches on hinges ; his head looks 
about the size of the head of a match. But he plays 
with a careful dexterity that is far removed from the 
stiffness suggested by this image. 



TEST MATCHES 

He is incapable of Berserk rage in his batting. 
He ultimately lost his wicket through attempting 
to imitate it. But it was delightful to watch him 
as he felt himself more and more the master of the 
bowling and sent the ball spinning to the boundary 
in a parabolic curve that even the demon fielders of 
Australia, running at top speed, could not intersect. 

As for Douglas, he, too, seemed to be a careful 
master, as he stood with his bat moving like a steady 
pulse, and guarded his wicket against Armstrong's 
trickery. His hair always shines, but never before 
did it shine as it shone on Saturday. It shone in the 
sun like polished metal. It is generally believed to 
be the most polished hair in the history of English 
cricket. 

Douglas's parting down the middle is as famous 
as Grace's beard. He is recognisable also by his 
stiffish walk, as of a man in armour, or a man who, 
for his height, is a little short between the knee and 
the ankle. When he wants to steal a run, however, 
he is like a man who in his excitement forgets that 
he is wearing armour, and at such times he always 
beats the field. 

Macdonald was tried against him before luncheon. 
He is the most attractive of the Australian bowlers 
to watch. Sunburnt to the colour of a Red Indian, 
he is also lithe as a Red Indian, as he runs toward 
the wicket, moving the hand that holds the ball 
sinuously, as a serpent moves its head. 

Like a darting serpent, too, is the ball as it shoots 
71 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

its way along the grass to the far wicket. Deadlier 
far than Gregory on Saturday, Macdonald would 
have fascinated any other English batsman but 
Douglas or WooUey into impotence. 

It was a ball from Macdonald, however, that 
Douglas first drove spinning to the railings. Then, 
when Mailey came on, with what may be called his 
Sunday-school bowling, Douglas began to hit out 
as if cricket were after all not war but a popular 
amusement. 

" When our Johnnie begins to slog," I heard 
someone say, " he can hit as hard as anybody." 
" Our Johnny," however, began to try to slog, not 
only Mailey, but Macdonald. If he had hit that 
ball of Macdonald' s, it would undoubtedly have 
reached, Buckinghamshire. But long before " our 
Johnnie " had brought back his bat out of the sky 
his wicket lay in ruins. 

After that the match became a Woolley mono- 
logue, interrupted by a procession of batsmen out of 
the pavilion and back to it again. Evans had scored 
only 4 when there was a click, and a catch behind 
the wicket, with the Australian team all looking 
perfectly certain that he was out. The umpire gave 
him " not out," but it made no difference. Mac- 
donald shot his wicket dead with the next ball. 

Tennyson came on and stood at the wicket, squat 

and bent like a T-square. He had evidently never 

seen such bowling before. He thought, however, 

he knew what to do with Mailey. He ran up the 

72 



TEST MATCHES 

pitch, rejoicing to meet him. But Mailey is not so 
innocent as he looks. He had lured Tennyson out in 
order that he might be stumped by Carter before he 
could look round. 

Nor did Haig do any better. His only glory, 
indeed, was to be missed twice by the mighty 
Pellew, who tumbled and rolled on the ground after 
his spring at the ball. 

With seven wickets down for 156 the game became 
almost exciting. Everybody was discussing eagerly 
whether there was any chance that the tail of the 
team would last long enough to enable Woolley to 
score 100. 

Parkin came on, attempted to play football rather 
than cricket with Mailey' s bowling, and, after doing 
this twice, was clean bowled. 

Then Strudwick appeared, and stood at the 
wicket, a bantam, while Carter, another bantam, 
kept the wicket, behind him, and Mailey, who is a 
larger bantam, bowled to him. If he was little, 
however, he could make a big hit, and when he swept 
the ball twice to leg for 4 the Surrey men in the 
crowd were as uproariously delighted as if anybody 
else had scored a century. 

There was now nothing left but Durston's six- 
foot-three and Woolley. They apparently made up 
their minds that they were as likely to take the score 
up to 200 by violence as by passive resistance. 
Woolley, thereupon, set out to prove to Mailey that 
you should not send up the ball to a really great 
73 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

batsman as though you were throwing him a lemon. 
He ran up the pitch to meet him with bat rampant. 

Had he been playing golf that would have been 
a great stroke. But it was an error in cricket. The 
ball that had missed WooUey's bat did not miss 
Carter's hand, and WooUey looked round to find 
himself stumped after scoring 95 runs against the 
finest fielding on earth. He had with his own bat 
scored more than half of the English total of 187. 

The Australians did not begin their innings till 
after an early tea, but they at once set to work to 
show that they could bat as well as they could 
bowl. 

Bardsley and Andrews, in contrast to the 
English batsmen, batted as though the field were 
half-empty, and as though there were infinite 
green spaces over which it was perfectly safe to 
drive the ball. Andrews, for his part, was mistaken, 
and, when the score was only 19, he treated Durston's 
fast bowling a little too optimistically and was 
caught at the wicket by Strudwick. 

But when Bardsley and Macartney got together 
they did more or less what they liked with the 
bowling. Douglas rubbed the ball on his forearm 
before bowling, as if to make it smooth and shiny 
for its task, but in vain. He rubbed his hands on 
the grass, as is his way, but equally in vain. The 
score went up to 56, and neither he nor Durston, 
long as the Long Man of Wilmington, could get 
another wicket. 

74 



TEST MATCHES 

The score would have been considerably smaller 
if the English team had been able to field like the 
Australians. The English fielders are not, like the 
Australians, thought-readers who know what a bats- 
man is going to do with the ball before he does it. 
One or two of them even seemed unable to hold 
the ball when it came directly towards them, and 
spectators cried out more than once in rude 
impatience : " Get hold of it ! " 

Macartney's was not the greatest of the Australian 
innings. But it was the most delightful to watch. 
Reputed to be the second finest living batsman, 
he would possibly be the greatest if he were only 
a few inches taller. 

He plays his strokes with the ease with which 
Nijinsky moves in a ballet. His chief characteristic, 
indeed, seems to me to be perfect ease rather than 
perfect grace. It all looked too easy to last, and 
Durston's speed of ball and Strudwick's speed of 
eye defeated him in the end as they had defeated 
Andrews. 

The Australian batsmen did not begin to think 
twice about what to do with the bowling until Haig 
and WooUey were bowling together. WooUey is 
one of the puzzle bowlers. He is a bowler with an 
unusual action. He first walks a yard, then breaks 
into a run for a step or two, then stops almost dead, 
as if he were not going to bowl at all, but to turn 
back again and have another try. He must get very 
little impetus from his run when he finally looses 
75 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

the ball. He seems as if he might almost as well 
bowl standing still. 

Though the scoring became slower in face of this 
novel attack, it was still fast enough, and Bardsley 
and Pellew kept the fielders busy running after balls 
that seemed to reach the southern boundary with 
astonishing ease. I heard one man explaining to 
his neighbour that Lord's ground is 7 ft. lower at 
the south side than at the north, as though the ball 
rolled automatically down the slope and made 4 
for the batsman at the merest tap. Bardsley and 
Pellew certainly gave it the necessary taps. 

Bardsley played with magnificent strength and 
staidness, though he was limping and in apparent 
pain, and constantly rubbing his thigh. As for 
Pellew, he struck out at everything that it was safe 
to strike at, and scored 43, though the crowd had 
yelled " Out ! " excitably some time before, believing 
that he was leg-before-wicket. 

" I wouldn't like to have that crowd as umpire," 
said an Australian spectator sarcastically. 

The last minutes of play were slow enough, when 
Taylor came in and played the cricket of a man at 
the practice net who returns ball after ball from an 
echoing bat, but doesn't hit out in such a way as to 
endanger anybody. 

Still, it was he who swung to the boundary the 
ball that took the Australians beyond the English 
total with only three wickets down. 

A few minutes later the last ball was bowled, and 
76 



TEST MATCHES 

twenty or thirty thousand people were pouring over 
the ground and out of the ground. Luckily, it was 
easier to get out than to get in. Then the queues 
began to form up all over again at the bus stages 
and outside the Underground. 

I hurried away on foot, however, as the man who 
imitated bird-noises with the twopenny toy was 
still walking up and down whistling like a drunken 
and disorderly skylark into the ears of anybody who 
lingered in the neighbourhood. 



n 



IX 

TEST MATCHES 

WOOLLEY THE HERO 

WOOLLEY was undoubtedly the hero of 
the hour. At Lord's on Monday he 
surpassed even WooUey. His secret, I 
fancy, was that he was the first Englishman to 
discover that the Australians are not devils but 
merely human beings. 

He was feeling carefully about — experimenting 
like a man of science — for this discovery at Trent 
Bridge. He made his final experiment thrillingly 
at Lord's on Saturday. On Monday he uttered 
his " Eureka ! " and played like a master of cut 
and drive who cared no more for either bowler or 
fielder than a good poet cares for a hostile critic. 
He realised that his was the best job of all, and he 
enjoyed his good strokes like finding the right words. 

But that comes in a later part of the story. 

First of all, there was the crowd to get in, but not 
the crush to get in, that there had been on Saturday. 
The management of Lord's had made reasonable 
arrangements, and one did not see even an ex- 
Prime Minister struggling helplessly to get near the 
turnstiles. 

78 



TEST MATCHES 

At the same time, the crowd in the popular parts 
of the ground did not settle down into the calm that 
becomes a cricket match until long after the play 
had begun. 

Those who had arrived early found — in one 
corner of the ground at least — that they could not 
see the game because of the cross-current of eager 
late-comers who streamed endlessly past them in 
search of good positions. The yells of " Sit down ! " 
during the first hour were like the yells of angry 
barrackers. They were like the clamour of ten 
thousand sea-gulls when the herring fleet arrives 
in St Ives harbour. 

At length a school of policemen was sent over 
to settle matters, and after a little dexterous assort- 
ment, during which a great many indignant young 
men had to shift their positions, the clamour died 
down. 

On the whole, however, it was a noisy day's 
cricket. Some people were for a time noisy because 
they could not see. The crowd in general quickly 
became noisy because of what it did see. 

Bardsley, with 88 not out on Saturday, had 
seemed a gigantic and scarcely challengeable figure. 
Consequently, when Woolley, in the slips, caught 
almost his first attempt to tip one of Douglas's fast 
balls to the boundary, the crowd was delighted as at 
the fall of a noble enemy. 

This success put strength into Durston's arm, and 
swiftness into his cast, and immediately afterwards 
79 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Armstrong, a giant even among giants, saw his 
middle stump torn from the ground before he had 
scored a single run. 

The shout that greeted this was like the shout of a 
football crowd when the winning goal is scored. I 
heard an Australian who had been just outside the 
ground at the time saying to somebody : "It didn't 
sound human. It was like machine-guns firing from 
a corrugated iron roof." It didn't sound quite like 
that. But exaggeration is half the battle. 

Then Gregory, third of the giants, came, and, 
after a few balls, began to teach the crowd the folly 
of premature shouting. 

Though a right-handed bowler, he is a left-handed 
bat and in his mighty hands the bat seems a smaller 
thing than in the hands of other men — more like a 
racquet or a scoop than a bat. He often uses it, 
indeed, to scoop the ball round to the leg-side, and 
he misses no chance of making a run, however 
perilous. 

He is a bony, high-stepping man, and he sets out 
to run with much the same spring as when he bowls. 
He is not, the experts say, a faultless player, and, 
indeed, it was just a chance that he was not caught 
off Durston's swift-paced bowling early in his 
innings. 

He earned his 52, however, by the splendid fre- 
quency with which he aimed at the boundary, 
loosening his shoulders and driving the ball with a 
beautiful assurance. 

80 



TEST MATCHES 

Taylor, too, played with much more assurance 
than he had shown on Saturday. It was evidently 
the Australian cue not to treat the English bowling 
too reverently, but in the end Taylor got his leg in 
front of the wicket to a fast ball from Douglas, and 
had to leave the field with his score at 36. 

He is noticeable among the Australians for (among 
other things) the " duncher" cap that he wears low 
down over his forehead, such as you see on the 
cinema. 

Six wickets were now down for 230 runs, and the 
match had regained something of the excitement of 
a race. 

Even the Australian spectators, who had con- 
gregated under their own starry flag in the north- 
west corner of the ground, began to feel a little 
anxious, as could be judged from a blood-curdling 
scream emitted by a too-patriotic lady when 
Gregory had the closest possible shave, and seemed 
in danger of being run out. That scream, and the 
roar of general laughter that followed it, however, 
relieved the tension. 

Parkin was by this time bowling instead of 
Douglas — bowling with a grace second only to 
Macdonald's. 

He is a man of exactly the right height, with 
exactly the right width of shoulders, and exactly 
the right rhythm of step, who bowls with exactly 
the right pace. A dark man, he alone of the English 
team wears a narrow black band round his waist 
F 8i 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

that makes him a conspicuous figure of black-and- 
whiteness. 

He begins his run with face sHghtly lowered, and 
the ball in his left hand. Then he raises his face, 
passes the ball into his right hand, and brings his 
arm round as if making a perfect circle. His 
bowling, though not what critics call fast, was too 
fast for Hendry, who batted, indeed, in the un- 
adventurous fashion of the English batsmen on 
Saturday. 

As for Parkin he proved in the end to be too 
much even for Gregory, running up the pitch and 
catching him from his own bowling. Apart from 
his batting, indeed, he played with Australian 
skill, and was one of the few English fielders who 
showed that he had the genius for making his lines 
impenetrable. 

He caught Mailey as he had caught Gregory, off 
his own bowling, and altogether played a game that 
was as charming to watch as it was reasonably 
successful. 

With nine wickets down for 289, it looked as 
though the Australians might have to fight for the 
match after all. But Carter changed all that. 

Carter is the comedian of the Australian team. 
His midget-like stature is itself a joke. His little 
jerky walk is a joke. It he misses a ball he looks up 
and beams behind his moustache. To see him ex- 
change a jest with Armstrong is to see Tom Thumb 
and Falstaff laughing together. 
82 



TEST MATCHES 

But as a batsman he is not by any means a joke. 

He can cut, he can pull the ball to leg, with any 
giant among them. He undoubtedly was nearly 
out more than once — sometimes to his own obvious 
amusement. But he stayed in long enough to make 
46 in the company of Macdonald. 

With Australia all out for 342, the match was not 
yet irretrievably lost to England, and when the 
Englishmen came out to bat after lunch they looked 
as if they had been reading all the papers and had, 
in consequence, taken lessons in how not to be 
hypnotised either by demons or by fat men. 

Unfortunately for him, Knight had not learnt his 
lesson perfectly, and, when he had scored only one, 
he swept the ball like a schoolboy high into the air 
over his head and was caught by Carter. 

When WooUey came out, he and Dipper soon 
made it evident that they no longer regarded either 
Gregory or Macdonald as a fast bowler. Considering 
the way in which the Australian fielders spread a net 
for even the most brilliant batsmen, the long stand 
made by Dipper and Woolley, and the confidence 
with which thej^ batted, were all but in the great 
tradition of cricket. 

It was not that the bowling was not dangerous 
— even physically dangerous. Gregory wounded both 
of them. 

At one point the ball caught Woolley just below 
the right kidney, and the game had to be stopped 
while Armstrong went over and massaged his back, 

83 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Gregory coming up in evident distress over the result 
of his ball. 

But Woolley quickly had his revenge, sending the 
red ball flying to right and to left as he pleased. 

As for Dipper, he was struck on the hand, and had 
to take his glove off and shake out the pain. But 
he, too, took his revenge on the next ball, and drove 
it almost to the boundary. 

I do not know if he has all the varied skill of 
Woolley. He loves the bold drive of the ball, 
where Woolley loves to "snick" it — I think that 
is the word — ^between his bat and his legs to the 
boundary. 

With Dipper gone, however, and Hendren once 
more unfortunate, allowing the ball to run up his 
bat and fly from the tips of Carter's fingers into 
Gregory's hands, it became moderately certain that 
there was going to be no race for victory after all. 

But at least there was more of a race at Lord's 
than there had been at Nottingham. At Notting- 
ham no lady could possibly have been excited 
enough to utter that blood-curdling scream. 



84 



X 

TEST MATCHES 

Tennyson's captaincy at leeds 

THE field at Headingley is as round as that 
Round Table concerning which the Hon. 
Lionel Tennyson's grandfather wrote a great 
deal of verse that Englishmen no longer read. On 
the first day of the third Test Match it scarcely 
looked like a field at all. 

If you can imagine a long-disused billiard-table 
on which people have been spilling tea and stout and 
cigarette ashes for a hundred years you will get 
some notion of the ruin that had been wrought upon 
the grass by the incessant sun. It had as many 
colours as Joseph's coat, and they were all the wrong 
colours. It had been carefully valeted, no doubt, 
but none the less it was frayed, faded, and in rags. 

A Yorkshireman assured me that nothing worth 
calling a crowd was present. Thirty-three thousand 
people have been known to pack themselves into the 
ground, and on Saturday there were only twenty- 
one thousand. 

I do not know where the other twelve thousand 
could have been fitted in. The ground seemed to 
me to be overflowing with human beings right up to 

85 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

the top of the walls, and the overhanging elder 
bushes. Large family parties had collected on the 
balconies of the slated brick villas that overlook the 
ground. 

It was the first Test Match of the year at which 
thousands of the spectators wore straw hats, and of 
these thousands hundreds wore handkerchiefs under 
their hats to protect the backs of their necks from 
the evil eye of the sun. 

Not that the heat was overwhelming ; there was a 
current of coolness in the air. What made the day 
almost intolerable, however, was a gramophone, or 
rather a stentorphone, that bellowed advertisements 
at us during the waits. It asked us in a voice 
louder than was ever used for selling coal in the 

streets, "Have you read the ?" mentioning a 

paper of which you have perhaps never even heard 
the name. 

At length the crowd could endure it no longer, and 
groaned in impotent despair at each new mention of 
the paper. I foresee a time when all the rival papers 
will have stentorphones at cricket matches shouting 
raucously against each other like bookmakers. It 
is one way of destroying the peace of the cricket 
field, and bringing it nearer the ideal of a Bank 
Holiday on Hampstead Heath. 

As for the match itself, Douglas, after making 
way for Tennyson, had to be the English captain 
after all. 

Tennyson's brief captaincy had been an immense 
86 



' TEST MATCHES 

success apart from his loss of the toss. He had 
seen two perilous Australian batsmen out for 45 
runs. 

Then, as he stooped to field a ball hit ever so gently 
by Macartney, he misjudged the distance, or the ball 
must have been more fiery than it looked, spinning 
over that fiery ground. He snatched back his hand, 
looked at it, and showed it to the players near him, 
like a child with a cut finger asking for sympathy. 

Holding up his thumb, which one could not help 
imagining all bloody, he ran to the pavilion and 
stayed there, while Hallows came out and fielded as 
his substitute. Australia had not drawn first blood, 
but she had drawn blue blood. 

Douglas, after his failure at Nottingham and 
Lord's, had evidently come prepared to play the 
match of his life. As he bowled his first over with 
long jumping strides — long at least for his middling 
size — he had the air of showing you how stumps can 
be torn out by the roots by sheer will-power, assisted 
by a small red ball. 

Bardsley and Andrews did not mind. They 
replied by showing how a small red ball, even a small 
red-hot ball, can be hit to the boundary. Douglas 
merely raised his foot in a larger and more deter- 
mined stride, and Bardsley struck out, sending the 
ball singing like a bee into the slips. He was out. 
Woolley had caught it. 

This was a piece of good fortune for England. 
Bardsley has all the qualities of a stone wall except 

87 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

its inability to hit back. The first hne of Austraha's 
defences was down, and the crowd was jubilant. 

Again and again Douglas leaped up to the wicket 
with turned-out toes, caring little if the ball was 
occasionally tricked by the edge of the bat into the 
corner of the field. Andrews, feeling masterful, 
struck out as Bardsley had done, and again the ball 
went singing like a bee, and Woolley sprang at it, 
stretching out his arm to twice its natural length, 
and the second Australian was out with the score 
at 45. 

Meanwhile Macartney had begun his beautiful 
innings. He is a small, long-chinned man, who 
wears the peak of his cap low down over his eyes in 
a way that makes him look like a jockey. On his 
feet he is a light-weight. He does everything lightly. 
I doubt if his feet make any noise when he runs. 
He has the gift of striking the ball all but silently to 
the boundary. He gives you the illusion that he is 
playing with a tennis ball. 

One can hardly believe that so feathery a touch 
can have made the ball travel so far. Yet it did 
travel. It travelled into every corner of the field 
except where a fielder was. His is the art of the 
Artful Dodger. He glances round under the peak 
of his cap to see where every fielder is, and with a 
turn of the wrist he has the ball running like a rat 
half-way between two of them, and two exhausted 
Englishmen charging after it to the boundary. 

He caused a curious scene on Saturday. As the 
88 



TEST MATCHES 

clock struck twelve he stood away from the wicket 
while the bell sounded, puzzling the crowd, the 
fielders, and Douglas, who waited impatiently to 
get on with his bowling. It brought into the cricket 
field a strange reminiscence of a Catholic village 
pausing from its activities at the noon Angelus. 

Almost before the twelfth slow stroke had sounded 
Macartney had his bat in position again, and a 
relieved laugh went round the mystified spectators. 

White had meanwhile been bowling from the far 
end. He is a slow left-handed bowler. He sails 
up to the wicket, like a moving ninepin, with the 
shortest of runs, and then precipitates a full pitched 
ball with far more force than you have been led to 
expect. 

It must be the spin of the ball that he holds in 
fingers gnarled round it like the exposed roots of a 
beech that makes his bowling so difficult to play. 
He got no wicket on Saturday, but the bowling 
analysis does not do justice to the skill with which 
for a time he kept the Australians from making runs. 
On Saturday Macartney and Pellew would probably 
have beaten any English bowlers. They certainly 
beat White, as they beat Douglas and Parkin and 
Hearne and all the rest of them. 

Pellew faced Douglas with a bare head that shone 
like the sun. Douglas's own hair shone like a 
mirror, but it was the sun's day. Pellew as the 
Sun God blazed triumphantly. He is the Apollo to 
Macartney's Hermes. 

89 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

He has no cunning, but drives the ball with 
glorious and careless strength. He swept the ball 
again and again into the long field or round his legs 
into the sky. In vain was bowler after bowler tried 
against this invincible pair. 

Parkin came on amid Northern cheers, measured 
the distance of his run, and marked the starting- 
point with his foot in the dusty grass with the 
gesture of a scratching hen. When bowling, he 
marches back from the wicket with a long springing 
stride. Then, at the right point, he swerves ab- 
ruptly, rushes towards the wicket with black head 
lowered, and looses the ball with a fury that he hopes 
is like the fury of the Australians. 

But it was no use. Macartney cut it ; Pellew hit 
it. Macartney sent it to the left ; Pellew sent it to 
the right. 

It was equally in vain that Hearne bowled at the 
other end. To watch Hearne bowling you would 
think that he had a little short arm in which the 
forearm had been left out and the hand was merged 
in the elbow. 

He gives the arm a funny little twist, and the ball 
a funny little throw, and you would be rather sur- 
prised if you saw a wicket falling in consequence. 
On Saturday a wicket didn't. 

Jupp is another matter. Jupp is a sturdy, 
medium-sized man with the shoulders of a bear, 
whose rush, like that of a bear, is dangerous. 

He rushed on Saturday till he melted, and his 
90 



TEST MATCHES 

bright hair lost its polish. But Australia was not 
to be rushed. It was itself doing all the rushing 
that was necessary. 

A local patriot called out mockingly : " Put a 
Yorkshireman on to bowl" ; but I doubt if even a 
Yorkshireman would have made any difference. 

First Macartney was 50, then Pellew was 50. 
First Australia was 100, then Macartney was 100. 
There was no relief from the monotony, save when 
some small incident occurred, such as Pellew' s 
striking the ball in such a way that it nested between 
his pad and his knee, and had to be retrieved by 
Brown, the wicket-keeper. 

Brown, by the way, is a tall man whose gloved 
hands are as the hands of a giant as he crouches 
over the wicket. 

At last Pellew was out, as a result of sending a 
ball into the air straight to Hearne. Taylor then 
came in and made 50, which was becoming a habit 
with the Australians. 

Gregory followed, and stood at the wicket for a 
few seconds like a bewildered kangaroo. He did 
not seem even to see the ball as it flew past him. It 
did not fly past him very often, for he was out fifth 
ball for one run. 

Lancashire colliers threw up their caps with 
delight and stood up to laugh congratulations to 
each other, for the wicket was Parkin s. 

Parkin's bowling was at this point terrific. He 
was bumping the ball half-way down the iron pitch 

91 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

as though he saw himself in the part of a Lancashire 
Gregory. 

He bowled for a time as he had probably never 
bowled before, his dark eyes alight with his in- 
flexible purpose. It is no exaggeration — at least, 
it is only a little one — to say that you could see the 
gleam in them from the stands. 

He was now the wielder of lightnings, and even 
Macartney was compelled to realise that a new 
element had entered into the game. 

His eye was too slow to follow so swift a ball. 
He suddenly found himself with his legs before the 
wicket mixed up with a ball that he had hoped to 
catch with his bat, and he limped in pain off the 
ground, amid the cheers of a crowd that was en- 
thusiastic to see him bat with such consummate 
genius and still more enthusiastic to see him out. 

Nor could Hendry play the balls that had puzzled 
Gregory and bewildered Macartney. 

Parkin sent deadly fire at his wicket, and he was 
clean bowled before he had scored a run. 

But that was the end of it. Armstrong came in 
and pitted his eighteen stone against the ball, with 
results disastrous to the ball. 

If Parkin was determined, Armstrong was more 
so, and he did not pause till he had lifted the ball 
right over the boundary among the spectators for 6. 

His partner was the little Carter, who got an 
ovation as the only Yorkshireman playing on either 
side. And Carter, small as he is, played as if he 
92 



TEST MATCHES 

also weighed eighteen stone, and hit fours as freely 
as though the field were no bigger than a ping-pong 
table. 

After Jupp had taken his wicket, Macdonald took 
his place, and he, too, began to slog with the obvious 
purpose of getting the score up to 400. He crouched 
over the bat with bent knees, and it was not long 
till he had sent the ball for 6 even further among 
the spectators than Armstrong. Then Douglas 
came on to bowl again, and Armstrong, tipping 
the ball as it passed, was caught by Brown at the 
wicket. 

After that Parkin soon got Mailey " caught and 
bowled," and England was left with thirty minutes' 
batting before stumps were drawn. 

Alas, poor Woolley! He was the first to go. 
Gregory stepped higher than usual, gave his tiger 
spring more fiercely than usual, and bowled 
straighter than usual, and the wicket was gone 
without a rim. 

It was truly no day for left-handed batsmen: 
Bardsley had failed, Gregory had failed, and now 
Woolley failed. 

As one watched England batting, one got the 
impression that the boundary was an infinite distance 
from the batsmen. While the Australians were 
batting one got the impression that the boundary 
was a narrow circle ; that the ball, if touched 
at all, could hardly help reaching it. 

I feel sure that it was the difference in the fielding 
93 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

that created this double illusion. It was the 
difference between keenness and leisureliness. It 
was the fielding of the Australians rather than their 
batting, or even their wonderful bowling, that made 
them an apparently invincible team. 



94 



XI 
TEST MATCHES 

brown's amusing innings 

THE second day of the Test Match at Leeds 
opened in football weather. The morning 
was chilly and dark. The general feeling 
of the spectators was chilly and dark. 

Everybody was besieging his neighbour with the 
questions, Would Hobbs bat? Would Tennyson 
bat ? Would it rain ? Why are the public buildings 
in Leeds so black ? 

Rumour at least had settled the first question. 
Hobbs, it was said, had appendicitis. He was on 
the ground, but a specialist had been sent for. 

Englishmen are commonly reported to take their 
pleasures sadly. There was nothing else for them 
to do to-day. At the same time, it seemed auspicious 
that the two batsmen who were to open the day's 
play on the English side should be footballers, inured 
to football conditions. 

Ducat did not last more than a quarter of an hour, 
at the end of which he tipped the ball into Gregory's 
hands. 

Hardinge, on the other hand, treated the bowling 
of both Gregory and Macdonald with breezy facility, 
95 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

and had it not been that the Australian fielders 
can race towards the boundary much faster than a 
fast ball, he would have scored considerably more 
than 25. 

When Armstrong, who had come on to bowl, sent 
a slow and dexterous ball between his feet, the field 
paused doubtfully for a moment before he was given 
out leg-before-wicket. 

Douglas and Jupp now began to attempt an 
exhibition of masterful batting. In the dull light 
they looked like twins. They are twins in height 
and twins in the parting of their hair. They also 
batted like twins, answering single with single, and 
not even leaving a four long without its companion 
four. 

Douglas was wounded at an early stage, and bent 
over his bat in pain as the result of a shaft from 
Macdonald that caught him inside the knee. A few 
minutes later he sent his bat flying down the pitch 
after striking the ball. 

He and Jupp were hitting out and running the 
sort of close-shave runs that bring back excitement 
into the game. 

But it was not long before Jupp struck with too 
blind a confidence at Gregory, and an all but missed 
ball was flicked into the wicket-keeper's hands. The 
score was 67 for five wickets. 

The position of England was worse even than it 
had been at the same stage at Nottingham. The 
batting of Brown, who took Jupp's place, however, 

96 



TEST MATCHES 

differentiated this Test Match from all other Test 
Matches. 

Brown is a huge left-handed batsman, whose 
favourite gesture is to swoop down on the ball with 
a circular pull and aim it at the boundary. He 
swung his bat like a club — a Hercules of the cricket 
field. 

On one occasion he swung with such violence that, 
missing the ball, he also missed his footing, and 
danced on unsteady feet right round his wicket, on 
which he was in imminent danger of falling. 

The crowd was by now in laughing mood. A 
laugh went round the spectators when Armstrong 
sent all his fielders but one to the leg side, and rolled 
up apparently innocent little balls to tempt Brown 
to hit them into the air. Brown swung and missed. 
The next ball bounced lazily. Brown swung again, 
and this time there was no mistake about it. The 
ball went faster and farther than any fielder. 

It could not be said of Brown that he had resisted 
temptation, but he had not succumbed to it. He 
simply met the serpent half way and belaboured it. 
Armstrong in the end had to admit that he had failed 
in the role of tempter, and he handed over the part, 
though not the make-up, to Mailey. 

Nothing, however, could stop Brown from scoring. 
The very fielders seemed to be in league with him. 
Even Pellew began to let the ball run past him. 
Australians are not accustomed to this Christmas 
chill on the cricket field. Their fingers were 
G 97 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

probably numb with cold, as my own are while 
writing these words. 

As for the crowd, it kept its hands warm by 
applauding Brown. He did not score with des- 
perate haste, but when he did score he scored with 
a resounding bang. 

He had overtaken Douglas's total well before 
luncheon, and in the very last over before luncheon 
he took his own score up to 50 and the English score 
to 151. He went off to luncheon through a crowd 
that was as wild with excitement as it was possible 
to be in the circumstances. 

Meanwhile, the evening papers had come out, 
and newsboys were crying, " Serious illness of 
Hobbs !" as the best-selling news of the hour. 

After luncheon, during which the appalling 
gramophone was again turned on, Douglas and 
Brown settled down to scoring singles, till Macdonald 
sent down a little red terror that Brown just touched 
and sent flying through the frozen Australian slips 
for 4. On a warmer day one of them would have 
caught it. 

Immediately afterwards Douglas's score was up 
to 50, and it seemed that the great defence in a lost 
cause had dug itself in. But Brown at last was 
tempted by Mailey, and sent the easiest catch in 
the world to Armstrong at mid- off. His innings of 
57 had been both amusing and romantic. 

Romantic, though not amusing, was the full- 
pitched ball with which Macdonald immediately 

98 



TEST MATCHES 

afterwards struck White's middle stump till it 
leaned over like a tree after the world's greatest 
gale. 

When Tennyson came out with his injured hand 
he got the cheers due to a wounded warrior, and 
great was the delight when he swept a ball of 
Macdonald's to leg so that it almost beat Taylor in 
its race to the boundary. 

Great was the delight when he cut Mailey low 
along the grass for 4, though there was a deep howl 
of horror followed by a roar of relief when he sent 
the next ball within reach of Mailey' s hand and 
Mailey missed it. 

Then Douglas had a piece knocked out of his bat 
by Macdonald's fury, and at once he fleshed his 
new bat by sending Macdonald to the boundary. 
Tennyson emulated him by cutting one ball to the 
boundary past cover-point, another ball just over 
the heads of the slips, and sweeping a third to the 
edge of the field over the head of square-leg. 

Then, after an interval, he caught Mailey before 
the ball had touched the ground and slogged it all 
but out of the field in the cheerful old-fashioned 
tradition of cricket. 

At ten minutes past three Douglas scored a single 
and raised the English score to 200, upon which 
Gregory demanded a new ball from the umpire. 
The old one had certainly been treated with more 
brutality than most people had expected from the 
English cricketers earlier in the morning. 

99 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Tennyson showed that he could hit a new ball as 
well as an old one. His bat flashed — it gleamed, it 
warmed the air. He stands with a curiously stumpy 
attitude at the wicket, but he rises into noble grace 
as he gathers up all the power in his body for a 
lofty drive or a fine fencing cut where there are 
no Australians to interrupt the ball's flight to the 
boundary. 

He reached his 50 with a stroke that turned 
Gregory'^s bowling fire into batsman's fire that was 
too hot for the men in the slips to hold on its 
way past for 4. The only time the ball was lost, 
however, it did not even reach the boundary, but 
lay dead in a patch of sand-coloured grass, where 
Pellew looked for it in the helpless bewilderment 
of a sand-blind man. This, too, caused roars of 
laughter. 

Armstrong now tried every possible change of 
bowling. He did not keep any bowler long at work, 
but put on one after another till he himself at last 
succeeded where the others had failed, and got the 
wicket that had withstood all the elements of 
bowling since the beginning of the day. 

Douglas was out after as dogged a 75 as has ever 
been slowly piled up in the face of odds. The crowd 
rose to its feet to cheer him, and hats were waved 
excitedly. Douglas deserved it. 

As for Parkin, who followed him, he gave a de- 
lightful display of comic batting that made the crowd 
hysterical with laughter, and left the very fielders 

100 



TEST MATCHES 

holding their sides. He is one of the most graceful 
of bowlers, but he bats with abrupt, jerky move- 
ments that make his every stroke a jest. He also 
keeps pretending to run in a way that makes his 
partner tremble in his shoes and the fielders lose 
their heads, while the crowd laughs uproariously. 

His batting had, however, its sensationally serious 
aspect. His first run was merely funny, but when 
he struck out at Armstrong, and pulled him to the 
boundary, he raised the score to a point which 
prevented England from having to follow-on. 

And he was just in time. Immediately afterwards 
Tennyson struck at a ball and tipped it into the 
hands of Gregory, always terrible as a lion in the 
gates. It was as sensational an end to the innings 
as could have been desired. To have scored 259 
was, in the circumstances, a great achievement. 
Meanwhile the newsboys were shouting : " Result of 
Hobbs's operation ! " It is an ill wind that blows 
nobody good. 

After tea Bardsley and Andrews batted for 
Australia in dingdong fashion, scoring off Douglas 
and White with workmanlike ease, but with more 
than English speed. 

They were missed, but not missed discreditably, 
several times. Jupp was put on, and carried 
Bardsley' s stumps by rush tactics, but not before 
the score was 70. 

The crowd was by this time larger by several 
thousands than it had been since the match began, 

1 01 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

and the boundary was littered with orange peel and 
waste paper after the manner of a public holiday. 

But the keenness had gone out of the game. 
The very excellence of the Australians had become 
monotonous. Parkin caused greater public interest 
by juggling the ball into his hand with his foot than 
even did the swordwork of Macartney. 

The crowd was ready to laugh at anything. It 
laughed when Brown, standing behind the wicket, 
began hunting for the ball, which obviously could 
not be five yards away, and eventually discovered it 
between his knee and his pad. But the game itself 
had gone as flat as a pancake. 

There is no spectacle of which human beings tire 
more quickly than victory. There is some old 
nursery nonsense that runs : " Then Johnny sat 
down and told me that story over and over and over 
again." That is what the Australians had done. 

One could appreciate the cricket no longer. If 
one did, it was only because it had made the 
gramophone stop. 



XII 
TEST MATCHES 

AUSTRALIA WINS THE RUBBER 

IT was easy to get a taxi to the Headingley ground 
on the third day. Charabancs had gone down 
from a shilHng to sixpence a seat. There were 
probably not more than five thousand people present 
when play started, and yet it was both a beautiful 
and a critical day. 

There was a summer haze over the ground in con- 
trast to the winter haze of the previous day, yet the 
only group of spectators who had come in as great 
numbers as on other days were the disabled soldiers 
in hospital blue. 

On arriving at the ground one was met with the 
usual gloomy question: "Have you heard the 
news ? " 

Douglas, it was rumoured, would be unable to 
play. His wife had been seized with sudden illness 
and had to be operated on immediately. Durston, 
who had spent the greater part of Saturday and 
Monday sitting in the pavilion and writing auto- 
graphs, was fielding in Douglas's place. Super- 
stitious people were saying that England should 
never travel with thirteen players again. 
103 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

The play began unexcitingly, though five Aus- 
traUan wickets had fallen within an hour and a 
quarter. So withered was the grass that the game 
looked like a game played on the sand of the sea- 
shore. Most of the English fielders wore sweaters, 
in spite of the fine morning. Though there was an 
air of seaside idleness over the field, the fielding 
and the bowling were both keener and more cun- 
ning than in any previous Australian innings during 
the Test Matches. 

Tennyson imitated Armstrong's tactics in mak- 
ing swift and numerous changes in the bowling. 
Andrews was the first Australian to fall. I doubt if 
any cricketer ever scored a less exciting 92 in a Test 
Match. It was not Andrews's fault ; it was simply 
that nobody thought it mattered much whether he 
scored nine or ninety. 

He is a man of talent rather than of genius — a 
sturdy policeman of the wicket, who can give a 
defaulting ball a violent shaking. 

White then set about justifying his reputation as 
a dangerous bowler. His bowling reminds one of 
angling ; it is a peaceful occupation and he uses the 
most tempting of bait. Pellew could not resist it, 
and was caught by Ducat at mid- on after a charac- 
teristic Pellew swipe. Taylor could not resist it, 
and was caught high up in Tennyson's right hand 
at mid-off. Gregory could not resist it, and a mere 
tip sent the ball into the hands of Jupp, who was 
fielding third man. 

104 



TEST MATCHES 

White himself missed two one-handed catches off 
his own bowhng, but he would have needed the quick 
genius of a Parkin or a Gregory to bring them off. 
Even Woolley missed a catch with those inevitable 
hands of his. Parkin had sent up a ball swifter 
than swift to Hendry, who tipped it to the wicket- 
keeper, who tipped it on to Woolley, who dropped 
it like a hot potato. Parkin received the ball back 
with a smile of forgiveness. 

When Australia, with seven wickets down for 273, 
declared its innings at an end, the only English 
bowler with an average worth crowing about was 
White, who had taken three wickets for 37 runs. 

The English team came out for its second innings 
with more signs of accidents. Brown, the huge 
wicket-keeper, who was batting along with Har- 
dinge, had apparently hurt himself, and Hallows 
came on with an extra bat to run for him. 

Hardinge, who had been fielding magnificently, 
was the unluckiest of batsmen. He was given out 
leg before wicket in the first innings, though it is 
reported that even the Australians believe that he 
had struck the ball before it reached his leg. 
To-day, after making 5, he was out as the result 
of a catch that nobody else but Gregory could have 
held. 

Even Gregory had to make himself nine feet high 
and leap into the air after the ball. He was just 
able to stop it, but sprang at it again as it fell from 
his hands, and this time held it. 
105 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

The most dreaded thing in Test Match cricket is 
to have to face Macdonald's bowhng with Gregory 
waiting in the sHps. 

After luncheon the Austrahans came out in 
playful mood. As they left the pavilion a lady in a 
mustard-coloured coat was lying in wait for them, 
among the usual mob of photographers, and they 
came to a halt with military precision while she 
snapped them, amid applause due to a comedy. 

Before the batsmen arrived, the fielders amused 
themselves like children by throwing each other 
catches of the joking sort. One thing was notice- 
able : they had all realised that it was a warm 
day, except Macdonald, who wore the usual white 
sweater with its yellow and green shoulder-collar. 
These, a spectator remarked, are the colours of 
Sinn Fein. 

Brown and Heame immediately began to play 
delightful cricket of the kind that aims at the rim 
of the field. Hearne is not much bigger than a 
good-sized frog, but there is a fine solidity as well as 
skill about his play, and he can cut to the boundary 
with any man through all the traps of the defences. 

Mailey was put on at a quarter to three to lure 
him skywards, but he immediately cut him with a 
fine stroke that Andrews found much too hot to 
hold. Unfortunately, in the next over he treated 
Macdonald as he was meant to treat Mailey, and 
spooned the ball in the foolishest of catches into the 
hands of Taylor at mid-on. 
io6 



TEST MATCHES 

WooUey then came on and greased the first ball 
through the massed slips for 4. Brown, mean- 
while, was hobbling every time he moved his feet, 
and after making a stroke he often drew himself 
up in the stiffness of pain. After attempting the 
Umslopogaas touch on a ball from Mailey, he 
staggered about in a ring like a tortured animal. 
He could endure the effort of hitting the ball, 
but the effort of missing it was evidently like 
walking down a steep step that isn't there in the 
dark. 

The game became exciting again as these two 
left-handed batsmen in blue caps stood up and 
attempted to achieve the impossible. They at- 
tempted to achieve it, moreover, not cautiously, but 
boldly, and Brown drove Macdonald straight to the 
white sight-boards with as little nervousness as 
though he had been on a winning side. 

But it was too good to last. He attempted to 
pull a fast Gregory ball to leg, missed it, and failed 
to get his limping feet out of the way in time, and 
was out leg before wicket for a 46 that was more 
gallant than most centuries. He was cheered with 
waving hats on his way back to the pavilion. 

Then we were surprised to see the glossy head of 
Douglas moving through the crowd to play after all. 
Three wickets were down for 98, but this was a game 
of miracles as well as accidents, and it still seemed 
just possible for England to save herself from 
defeat by a miracle. 

107 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Twice in one over did Woolley send Mailey's slow 
full-pitched ball flying like a swallow, and alighting 
just within the boundary, but a few minutes later, 
after once more sweeping Mailey to leg for 4 and 
tipping him through the slips for 2, he played a 
little fatuous ball on to his wicket and was out for 
37. 

Ducat, who followed, lasted only a moment when 
he stepped out to hit Mailey, and was stumped 
before he could get back into the crease. A minute 
later Gregory bowled one of those straight shooting 
invincible balls that genius itself could not stand 
up against, and Douglas's off stump lay over like a 
broken flower. 

Six wickets were now down for 128, and nobody 
believed any longer that even a miracle could save 
the game. 

Tennyson delighted the crowd by hitting Gregory 
first for 4 and then for 4, and then for 2 in 
the same over. The next ball, however, caught 
him in the flesh above the knee, and sent him 
squirming with pain, while Gregory came up to 
condole with him. But he scored off the next ball 
again. 

Then Jupp also began to be ambitious of scoring 
fours. He pulled first Gregory and then Mailey 
nobly to the boundary, but none of the English 
players was comfortable with Mailey, whose bowl- 
ing seems as inoffensive as an elderly hen. It 
seems almost unkind to hit it yet it apparently 
io8 



TEST MATCHES 

deceives the eye more effectively than far faster 
bowling. 

Every now and then Mailey makes the batsman 
confident by sending him a ball that he simply has 
to swish to the boundary. But the next ball dodges 
its way slowly behind the bat and leaves the batsman 
feeling like a gasping fish. 

Immediately after the interval Armstrong's very 
first ball sailed into Tennyson's wicket, leaving only 
two wickets to fall and rather more than 200 runs 
needed to save the game. 

White began, like so many of the other batsmen, 
by pulling Mailey to the boundary. In the next 
over Jupp touched a ball from Armstrong with 
the handle of his bat, and was caught at the 
wicket. 

Parkin came on as England's last hope, and not 
much of a hope at that, but his friends greeted him 
with " Bravo, Parkin ! " as though he were a maker 
of centuries, and laughed delightedly when he 
scored off his first ball. Then White stole a short 
run, and the field shrieked as the ball was thrown 
at the wicket. 

Parkin hit again, and once more the ball was 
thrown at the wicket amid excitement and laughter. 
After that he skied the ball for a perilous 2, 
and then Mailey put an end to the fun, and the 
match was over, with the crowd of sightseers flying 
over the sandy field like a poolful of demented 
tadpoles. 

109 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Well, it was a good match. It was infinitely the 
best of the three critical Test Matches. 

The English team had put up a great fighting 
defence. 

The match was at an end, but that gramophone 
from Gehenna was still squalling. 



XIII 
TEST MATCHES 

A ROW AT THE OVAL 

IT would be easy to make too much of the scenes 
that occurred at the Oval on Saturday, when 
the fifth Test Match was begun. But at least 
they brought a few minutes' dramatic excitement 
into as tedious a day's cricket as it would be possible 
to imagine. 

It all came of too much inspection of the wicket. 
The crowd got tired of sitting round an empty field 
with nothing happening but half-hourly strolls on 
the part of the two captains in their blazers from 
the pavilion to the wicket and back again. 

Armstrong would stoop down and feel the ground 
with his hand as a doctor " palps " a patient in order 
to discover the place where it hurts. Impatient 
voices would assail him : " Come along I " " Play 
up ! " Standing up, however, he would demon- 
stratively shake the water off his hand as a cat 
shakes its forefoot after having stepped in a puddle. 

After a time the crowd made up its mind that, 
if inspecting the wicket was to be the only sport of 
the day, it would relieve the monotony for every- 
body to do it. 

Ill 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

A number of the bolder spirits, having decided 
that the wicket could be passed as at least C3, then 
made their way towards the pavilion, and began to 
call loudly for the players to come out. 

They were joined by a thousand or so other 
people who had come to see what was happening. 
They seemed to have got it into their heads that 
it was Armstrong who was responsible for hold- 
ing up the game, and one youth went so far as to 
suggest that the Australians were afraid to face 
England. 

Imitating the voice of a newsboy he yelled : 
" Speshul ; Orstrylia runs away ! " Others con- 
tented themselves with bellowing : " Come out of 
it ! " " Be sportsmen ! " " Play up ! " One youth 
every now and then interjected a wonderful 
" Coo-ee ! " like the cry of a shriek-owl prolonged 
and a hundred times magnified. 

This subtle invitation to the Australians to come 
out dissolved the anger of the crowd into laughter, 
and the laughter became universal when a breath 
of wind lifted the canvas awning over the pavilion 
seats and upset a gallon of water that lay there in a 
pool, drenching the man who stood under it. That 
is always an excellent joke. 

As the tumult continued, a policeman made his 
way to the pavilion and hurried up the steps, with 
the evident desire to get somebody to do something. 

An instant later, Tennyson appeared on a balcony, 
holding up his hand for silence. But there was no 

112 



TEST MATCHES 

silence — only worse pandemonium, with most people 
cheering, and the rest interrupting one another with 
a thousand indistinguishable remarks. 

Tennyson beamed on them, like a fair-haired 
undergraduate about to make a speech amid the 
tumult of a " rag." His smile at length took effect. 
Amid what was as much like silence as could be 
expected, he bent forward and, in the voice of one not 
accustomed to open-air oratory, called out : "If you 
people will get back to your places, Mr Armstrong 
and I will inspect the wicket." 

This simple speech, in spite of the charm with 
which it was delivered, merely served to inflame 
the crowd. They did not wish to see the wicket 
inspected. They wished to see the game resumed. 

Instead of going back to their places they began 
to shout all the louder: "Where's Armstrong?" 
and to chant in chorus ; " We — want — Armstrong ! 
We — want — Armstrong ! We — want — Armstrong " ! 

This naturally led to the wicket not being in- 
spected, and this in turn led to increasing turbulence 
on the part of a section of the crowd. Tennyson at 
last could endure it no longer. He came down the 
pavilion steps and made his way through the surging 
crowd towards the wicket. 

After Tennyson's return to the pavilion the 
clamorous section of the crowd still remained on the 
field, calling for Armstrong, cheering Fender, cheer- 
ing Tennyson, and then, one or two of them, booing 
Armstrong again. 

H 113 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Tennyson's report on the wicket was apparently, 
as they say, " favourable," for in a few minutes a 
boy was sent out into the crowd carrying a black- 
board with the inscription chalked on it : "If no 
more rain, play will take place at 5.15." 

That meant another half-hour's waiting, but it 
changed the temper of the crowd sufficiently to 
enable a score or so of policemen to shepherd the 
people slowly back to their places and off the field 
of play. 

Once back in their places, the crowd waited 
patiently till a quarter past five, and shortly after- 
wards it was cheering the appearance of the umpires. 

When Armstrong and his men tripped down the 
steps, however, bad temper broke out again, and 
there were volleys of boos mingled with the general 
cheering. Cries of " Shame ! " were raised by the 
more sportsman-like section of the crowd, and the 
cheering in the end entirely drowned the booing. 

But all through the afternoon the malcontents 
showed that they had not forgiven Armstrong. 
They jeered when he tested the condition of the 
wicket with his foot, and one man called out : " Roll 
on it ! Roll on it ! " They cheered him derisively 
every time he fielded the easiest ball. They shouted 
at him if he seemed to walk in too leisurely a 
manner to his place in the field. 

In the end, it was as if Armstrong had resolved to 
amuse them out of their anger. He never moved but 
he ran. He would bolt even the shortest distance, 
114 



TEST MATCHES 

like a fat man running desperately to catch a train 
that is just moving out of the station. 

Great is the power of comedy. Gradually ill- 
temper faded, and men remembered that they had 
come to watch an entertainment and not to take 
part in a squalling match. 

As I have said, the row itself was a comparatively 
small affair, and only a tiny minority made them- 
selves hoarse joining in it. It was interesting 
because of its novelty rather than because of its 
seriousness. It was interesting, too, because it did 
express in a rude and unlovely way the boredom 
that nearly everybody felt. 

The truth is, Saturday was no day for cricket as 
the game is now played. When I arrived in town 
at ten o'clock in the morning the rain was dripping 
down, and the sky in the east was discoloured and 
dark, like a black eye. 

It was still raining when I reached the Oval just 
before eleven. There was no crowd assaulting the 
gates. The scene inside the ground was more de- 
pressing than a picnic in macintoshes. The Oval 
is a wonderful cricket ground, but its good qualities 
even at the best of times are those of usefulness 
rather than of beauty. 

As I sat watching the rain falling, I did my best to 
be interested in the gasometer by speculating on 
what would happen if a thunderstorm came on and 
the gasometer were struck by lightning. I saw 
myself, in my mind's eye, blown into surprisingly 
115 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

small bits, some of them travelling as far as Kew, 
others of them going in a northerly direction and 
reaching Willesden Jmiction. Then, just as my 
thoughts were beginning to get morbid, the rain 
stopped. 

There was no sign of play beginning, however, 
when half-past eleven came round. Not until some 
time after twelve did the long preliminary ritual 
begin — the inspection of the wicket with prodding 
fingers (Armstrong still wearing the blue suit and 
grey hat of a private citizen), the rolling-away of the 
low pent-houses that covered the wicket, the arrival 
of the bag of sawdust, the spilling of the sawdust so 
as to make two little yellow hills, the arrival of the 
stumps, the arrival of a man with a bucket, who 
set up the stumps and whitewashed the crease, the 
arrival of the roller, the departure of the roller, 
the spinning of the coin at the gate of the pavilion, 
the inspection of the coin on the grass, and then the 
arrival of the umpires in long robes whiter than 
whited sepulchres. 

Compared to the whiteness of the umpires, the 
flannelled Australians, as they poured out over the 
field, seemed figures of a faint and charming yellow, 
like that of evening primroses. And, indeed, on 
their appearance, it was as if the field had suddenly 
blossomed. There was a lingering gleam of summer 
in the air. It made the slates shine. It made 
Gregory's and Macdonald's hair shine. 

It did not succeed, however, in making the cricket 
Ii6 



TEST MATCHES 

shine. Gregory, who bowled the first over from 
opposite the paviHon, did not find the sHppery 
ground the springboard that he needs for his great 
feats. 

Both Russell and Brown settled down to play him 
with confidence, if without violence. They both 
scored off his first over, but they seemed to do so in 
the spirit of men digging themselves in and making 
occasional small sallies rather than of men about to 
take a position by assault. The excitement of the 
play was not owing to any tremendousness in their 
hitting, but to their readiness to steal every slightest 
opportunity of a run. Brown, especially, was like a 
restive horse at the starting post — almost too ready 
for a forward plunge. 

Russell batted with light ping-pong strokes, and 
looked as if he might have gone on doing so till he 
had made his century, when something happened, 
as he tried to sweep a ball of Macdonald's round 
to leg. 

It was impossible for a spectator to say whether 
he had struck the ball at all, but Oldfield, who had 
taken Carter's place as wicket-keeper, sprang after 
it as it bounded into the air, and Russell was out 
for 13 without apparently believing that he had even 
touched the ball. 

Tyldesley seemed a good deal less confident than 
he on taking his place. He frequently struck at 
the ball in the way in which one strikes at an insect 
that contrives just to keep out of one's way. 
117 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Brown played a more resolute game, the bat 
looking small as a child's bat in his hands as he 
crouched, a huge figure, over it and scooped the ball 
past the fielders. He was beginning to score fairly 
rapidly when Mailey was put on to bowl instead of 
Macdonald. 

But at length Mailey lured him into the mood of a 
man who believes it is safe to hit out at anything, 
and sent up a suave little ball that just deceived his 
eye and took his wicket when his score was 32. 

WooUey, who was received as an idol, also showed 
before long that a good batsman can play almost 
any sort of bowling, and he delighted the crowd 
by lifting a ball from Mailey into one of the 
stands. 

It seemed at first to be a 6, but apparently the 
ball had bounded into the stand off the ground. 
He, too, looked capable of scoring a century — or, 
say 99 — when he cut a ball in a way that ought to 
have sent it to the boundary. He attempted to score 
a second run off it, when Bardsley, who wasMelding 
with the genius of a Pellew, threw the ball fiercely 
at the wicket from a long way off, and Woolley was 
run out for 23. 

This did not happen, however, till after the rain, 
and after the interval, and after the second rain 
(that sent up five thousand umbrellas, giving the 
crowd on the other side of the ground the appearance 
of a field of gigantic purple mushrooms), and after 
the row, and all the rest of it. 
ii8 



TEST MATCHES 

Tyldesley was by this time playing more daringly, 
striking violently at the balls that Macdonald sent 
bounding round his head. One of these balls struck 
him on the neck, and play had to be stopped while 
he recovered. The crowd cheered him uproariously 
when he caught the next ball and swung it mag- 
nificently on its way to the boundary. He drove 
another ball to the boundary high over the fielders' 
heads. Then he became reckless, and sent another 
into the sky. Macartney leaped after it across the 
field, and Tyldesley was caught out with his score 
at 39 — the highest score of the day. 

Mead, who had been his partner for some time, 
played a game of skilful rather than of massive 
strokes. He has an amazingly keen eye, that seems 
both to take in the position of every fielder and to 
time the ball exactly. 

He gives the impression of brilliant preparedness 
and, with a sUght tap, he again and again sent the 
ball gently into an empty part of the field for a 
single. A sturdy, left-handed batsman, he does not 
wait for the ball (as most batsmen do) with his bat 
pulsing in the block-hole. He beats it against the 
ground once or twice, then droops his body into the 
exact position he wants, and awaits the bowling 
with the bat almost still in his alert hands. 

He and Sandham, who had taken Tyldesley's 

place, were obviously thinking more of keeping the 

wicket safe for Monday than of performing miracles 

on Saturday. And, in the queer flow of varying 

119 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

light in which they batted, it was manifestly the 
only thing to do. 

They were still batting defensively when stumps 
were drawn at half-past six, with the English score 
at 129 for four wickets. 

It would be a false report, however, that suggested 
that either the cricket or the scene outside the 
pavilion was the chief feature of the day at the Oval. 
The chief feature of the day was the number of 
yawns during the long waits between shower and 
shower. There were never before so great a number 
of yawning faces seen at a cricket match. Every- 
body had been longing for rain, and, now that it had 
come, everybody resented it. Hence the scenes. 

I think one result of these scenes ought to be to 
bring about an innovation in the game of cricket. 
Cricket ought to be a game capable of being played 
in all weathers. There should be a special wicket 
for wet days, and the players should be provided 
with oilskins and non-skid shoes. That would have 
saved the situation on Saturday. 

Meanwhile, the customs of cricket being what 
they are, the disturbers at the Oval on Saturday 
should in fairness have directed their anger, not 
against the Australian captain, but against the 
English weather. They should have summoned, 
not Armstrong out of the pavilion, but the sun out 
of the clouds. It^would have been equally effective. 



XIV 
TEST MATCHES 

MEAD SCORES 182 NOT OUT 

SANDHAM opened the game for England on 
the second day with infinite grace and 
patience, and runs came fast enough as he 
and Mead became accustomed to the bowhng. 

Mead, if he played less gracefully, seemed to 
be more dexterous in finding the loopholes in the 
field. 

He took a special pleasure in waiting, still as a 
heathen image, for one of Mailey's slow balls, then 
at the last moment stepping in front of the wicket, 
catching the ball on its inward hop, and patting it 
gently but with decision to leg. 

Occasionally, however, he struck out and with a 
scythe-like movement of his bat he swept a ball 
from Mailey to the boundary. 

He seemed at first to be puzzled by Armstrong, 
who went on to bowl instead of Mailey, but it was 
off Armstrong that he cut a ball that was only 
stopped within touch of the boundary and scored 
a 8 that brought his total up to 50 at about a 
quarter to twelve. 

Nor did Macdonald succeed, where Gregory had 

121 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

failed, in keeping him from scoring. Him, too, 
Mead cut through the shps for 4 with a stroke 
that turned the ball into lightning. 

A few overs later it was Macdonald who turned 
the ball into lightning, and it was Sandham, not 
Mead, whose eye proved not altogether quick 
enough to follow it, with the result that his wicket 
went flying, after he had scored 21. 

Tennyson, who followed, seemed to hesitate at 
Macdonald' s first ball, but he sent the third with 
the edge of his bat to the scoring board. 

In the next over, Mead, now playing like a burly 
giant, drove Armstrong all but to the boundary 
and, though Taylor picked the ball up beautifully 
as he ran at full speed, and turned a fine stroke into 
a mere single, it brought up the score to 200 for five 
wickets by ten minutes past twelve. 

As the score mounted up, Macdonald seemed to 
be getting tired. His hair was wet and standing up 
on the back of his skull, and a glass of water was 
brought for him to wash out his mouth. 

Both he and Armstrong kept hitching up their 
trousers like men in a state of exhaustion. 

The batsmen treated them both with respect, 
as one says, but without fear, and Mead showed 
something like genius in sending the ball on a flight 
through the slips without giving the sort of catches 
that Gregory can hold. 

It was off Mailey that Mead scored the single that 
gave him his century amid a jubilation of hands and 



TEST MATCHES 

throats that made the crowd seem to quiver Hke 
heat rising above a stove. 

The fact is, he began to hit Mailey's bowhng with 
the furious ease with which every spectator feels 
that he would like to hit Mailey's bowling if he had 
the chance. 

Before half-past one Tennyson had sent the score 
up to 300, whereupon Mead sent in to the pavilion 
for a new bat. 

After lunch Tennyson drove a ball from Macdonald 
low and straight to the boundary for 4. He at- 
tempted to repeat the stroke, missed, and was out 
for 51. 

To Fender, apparently, Macdonald' s bowling was 
invisible as the passing of a great wind. He made 
several attempts to catch sight of it. At last he saw 
the ball in time to touch it, but it went straight into 
Armstrong's hands, and Fender was out without 
scoring a run. 

Hitch, who came next, batted with the gay joy 
of a schoolboy, who didn't know — and didn't care — 
that the fastest bowlers in the world were doing all 
they could to get him out. 

Macdonald, however, is not a safe bowler to take 
too light-heartedly, and Hitch immediately after- 
wards found himself in a situation in which bat, 
wicket and ball all seemed to be flying about with 
great energy. Of the three, the wicket suffered 
most. Hitch was out for 18. 

Mead, with Douglas as his partner, continued to 
123 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

score with equal ease off Macdonald^ and Gregory. 
He scored right, left and centre, and would have 
scored a great deal more if it had not been for the 
Argus-eyed Pellew. 

The English innings was a fine rather than an 
exciting one. Mead's greatness is practical rather 
than romantic — big rather than decorative. He 
had accomplished a magnificent feat of batsman- 
ship, however, when Tennyson came out of the 
pavilion in his blazer at ten minutes to four and 
declared the innings at an end with the score stand- 
ing at 403 for eight wickets. Mead had scored 182 
not out. 

As he came off the field, everyone standing up to 
give him an ovation, Armstrong walked by his side 
and shook him warmly by the hand in congratulation. 

In the interval, a man with a broom came out and 
swept clouds into the air where Mead had left the 
wicket in dust. There also came several men with 
a roller that was much too big for them and rolled 
the pitch back into virtue. And along with them 
came the man with the whitewash bucket. 

The ground was by now crowded with spectators, 
who cheered with delight when it was seen that 
Hitch was to begin the bowling for England. 

Hitch, as you know, rushes up the crease in a sort 
of hop-skip-and-jump movement, and then flings 
the ball at the wicket with a vehemence that drags 
the shirt loose from his belt. He did not at once 
bring down a wicket, but he brought down Collins 
124 



TEST MATCHES 

with a ball that struck that great little cricketer and 
left him lying helpless and in pain on the ground. 

He was unlucky not to get Collins caught at the 
wicket, but a few minutes later he clean-bowled 
Bardsley with a ball that left the stumps leaning 
at all sorts of angles, and roused the spectators to 
a roar such as is more common at a football than 
a cricket match. One Australian wicket was down 
for 33. 

Hardly had Macartney, with his cap so low over 
his eyes that it was a wonder he could see, begun 
to give an exhibition of suave grace than he, too, 
tipped a ball from Hitch that Woolley might have 
held by a miracle. 

The speed that had been too much for Macartney, 
however, was also too much for Woolley. And so 
Hitch missed the chance of another wicket. 

Macartney seemed to bat with considerably less 
confidence after this. Repeatedly he struck at the 
ball and hit only the quiet air. 

He quickly got back his confidence, and cut and 
drove Douglas for 4 three times in one over, bring- 
ing the Australian score up to 54 at ten minutes past 
five. 

Immediately afterwards Collins, whirling his body 
as though trying to protect his face with his bat, 
trod on his wicket. 

Andrews, who succeeded him, whirled his bat to 
better effect, and swept Hitch's second ball to leg 
for 4. 

125 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Fender and Parkin were put on to bowl, and 
Andrews's head was more than once in danger from 
Parkin. 

But it was the fielding rather than the bowling 
that excited the crowd to enthusiasm. Thrice in 
succession Macartney drove the ball fiercely, and 
thrice in succession it was held — once by Fender, 
once by Tennyson and once by Hitch. 

He then tipped a ball exquisitely past the slips 
for 4, all of them run, and received the next ball 
lamingly on the ankle. In Parkin's next over 
Macartney sent the ball to right and to left behind 
the wicket, swift as rays of light. 

At ten minutes past six he had pulled a ball from 
Fender and sent it at the height of a flying sparrow 
to the boundary, bringing the Australian score 
up to 101 with two wickets lost. England had lost 
three wickets on Saturday some time before she had 
reached this total. 

Hitch was put on to bowl again at the Vauxhall 
end, and twice in one over Macartney cut him to the 
boundary, Tennyson just missing the ball each time. 
Andrews treated Parkin's next over in the same way, 
save that he sent the ball glancing twice to the right 
instead of to the left boundary. 

They had each reached 50 by ten minutes past six. 
By twenty past the Australian score had passed 150, 
WooUey's bowling having as little effect on these two 
admirable artists as the bowling of any of the others. 



126 



XV 

TEST MATCHES 

MERELY PLAYERS 

ENGLAND'S first innings at the Oval, like the 
fourth match at Manchester, had raised one 
new point of interest. Men began to ask 
each other whether the Australians were after all 
invincible. 

It became clear enough early in the third day's 
play that, for Test Match purposes, they were. 

The sun, which had been up even before I was, 
had dried the wicket till the very feet of the batsmen 
raised clouds on it as they moved. It was an ideal 
day for watching a nice seaside game — a day of 
summer holiday, with a gold sun shining on the green 
setting of a white game, with a ball redder than a 
billiard ball scuttling without intermission to all 
parts of the boundary. 

It was too late now for the Australians to win the 
match. What they obviously meant to do was to 
reach the English score and to add something to it. 

Andrews and Taylor were batting — both of them 
wearing caps with peaks that must have been made 
to defend the eyes against the blaze of an Australian 



127 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

They batted for a time like a pair of twins, and 
to an inexpert eye were almost indistinguishable, as 
they answered two with two and four with four, or 
ran a dangerously short single, each on two little 
legs — that seemed to be as busy as six. 

As one watched them sprinting between the 
wickets one seemed to have a revelation of one of the 
secrets of the Australian victories. The Australians 
are a team of sprinters, whether batting or fielding. 
Few English fielders can pick up the ball while 
rimning, as the Australians can, and send it in to 
the wicket with the skill of a good shot at polo at 
the very height of a gallop. 

These wonderful twins looked for a time as though 
they intended alone to take the score beyond the 
English figure. By a quarter to twelve, however, 
Andrews, who was 94, stepped forward to make 
short work of a ball from Parkin. He missed it, 
and it thudded against his pads. Parkin uttered a 
strangled cry, which may be roughly translated, 
"How's that?" 

" Out," said the imipire. 

Andrews looked reproachfully at his bat, slapped 
it like an old-fashioned nurse reproving a child, and 
bore it off amid applause to the pavilion. 

Parkin seemed to get new life from this triumph. 
He walked on the grass withl an unaccustomed 
spring. He charged down the bowling crease and 
loosed the ball with the vehemence of a man who, 
having got one wicket, believed that he could get 
128 



TEST MATCHES 

two. Pellew was the victim of his Dionysiac in- 
spiration. It was difficult to beHeve that he had 
hit the ball at all. But Woolley, crouching in the 
slips till his long figure was flat almost as a centi- 
pede's, had caught it ; and Pellew made his way to 
the pavilion, pausing to show Douglas the corner of 
his bat and to point energetically to some object 
no bigger than a worm a little way down the pitch. 
No doubt that explained everything. Several of the 
fielders walked down the pitch and gazed down on 
the object sympathetically if gratefully. 

The score was now 239 for five wickets, com- 
pared to the English score of 191 for five wickets 
on Monday. 

Armstrong succeeded Pellew and got an ovation 
as compensation for the ill manners of Saturday. 
Armstrong is always either a hero or a villain. It is 
one of the penalties of personality. 

He was hit on the leg by the very first ball, but, 
though he rubbed the place vigorously, he is much 
too huge a man with whom to sympathise. 

Huge though he is, however, he is not too huge to 
run, as he showed when Taylor drove Parkin to the 
rails, with Sandham — an out-fielder of Australian 
pace — racing to cut off the ball. Sandham just 
managed to pounce on the ball before it reached the 
boundary, but Armstrong and Taylor had run their 
4 all the same. Immediately afterwards, Sandham 
was off on another race to the boundary, as the 
long-headed Fender sent up a ball to Taylor with 
I 129 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

a jerk of the forearm like Hearne's, and Taylor's bat 
flashed to greet it. 

Hitch, who had been bowling at the Vauxhall end 
with much mopping of brow, now came on at the 
pavilion wicket, and, handing his blue cap to the 
umpire, set out on a series of those marvellous 
three-trip charges of his. He leaps into the air as he 
starts to run, rearranges his feet, runs, leaps again, 
runs again, and with the last leap hurls the ball. 
Taylor caught it on the point of his bat and sent it 
singing to the boundary. 

There was a pause in the scoring when Woolley 
came on to bowl. He produced for a few moments 
a condition of stalemate in which neither could 
England get a wicket nor Australia a run. It was 
Douglas, moistening his fingers to get a grip on the 
ball, who ultimately bowled Armstrong. It was 
Douglas, too, who bowled the ball that Taylor struck 
out at and, flicking with the edge of his bat, sent 
into the hands of Woolley, who so seldom makes the 
sort of mistakes he made on Monday. 

Seven wickets were now down for 291, as com- 
pared with seven wickets for 312 on the English side 
on Monday. But there was no Mead left to bat for 
the Australians. 

Gregory and Oldfield were batting partners — 
Gregory of the gigantic bones and Oldfield who 
moves so trippingly, like a gently jumping frog. 

Gregory began his innings with three fours, one 
of which was a race against Sandham, who was 
130 



TEST MATCHES 

flying after the ball to the boundary, and who 
brilliantly overtook it, but in vain. With his third 
4, Gregory took the Australian score beyond 300 
before one o'clock, and, though Tennyson changed 
the bowling repeatedly, the runs went on slowly 
mounting up till lunch-time, when the Australians 
had scored 338 for the loss of seven wickets. 

The game had by this time lost interest as a game, 
and had become mainly an exhibition. The bats- 
men relaxed and held social meetings with their 
enemies the bowlers. During a pause between 
overs, Oldfield discussed his bat with Douglas, and 
Douglas took it into his hands and held it experi- 
mentally in position. Gregory, on his way back to 
the crease, playfully swept Hitch's feet out of the 
path with his bat, and Hitch replied with a school- 
boyish push. 

The end no longer mattered. The fight was 
over. Cricket had ceased to be an excitement, and 
had become the recreation of a slumbrous August 
day. 



X3I 



XVI 
SPORT 

DURING the winter I let my house to an 
ex-officer's family. It is a house which 
consists almost entirely of books. There is 
very little in it, indeed, except books and windows. 
It is a madly indiscriminate collection of books — 
almost as mad as the library of the British Museum. 
There is a little of everything — from Aristotle down 
to The Ten Best Card Games for Two, from Achilles 
Tatius down to the sermons of " Woodbine Willie." 
Between these extremes there is a considerable array 
of poets and novelists, from Fielding to Mr George 
Moore, from Homer to the post-Georgians. 

One day the officer's wife met another lady, who 
asked her how she liked the house. 

" My dear," was the reply, " I have never been 
in such a house. There's simply nothing to read." 

" Oh," said the other lady, " I thought there 
were almost too many books." 

" Books ! " repeated the officer's wife, with a look 
of disgust ; "do you know, I've looked all through 
the shelves, and there isn't a hunting novel in the 
HOUSE !" 

The indictment is not absolutely fair. There is a 
132 



SPORT 

copy of Some Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. on the 
shelves, though there is nothing about Mr Jorrocks. 
There is Mr Masefield's Reynard the Fox, which is 
fiction of a kind, though in verse. At the same 
time, generally speaking, I must plead guilty on 
behalf of my shelves. There is a lamentable de- 
ficiency of books about sport on them. Treatises 
on fly-fishing are as rare as Aztec grammars, and 
lives of cricketers are as difficult to discover as lives 
of clergymen. 

There is a tattered and out-of-date copy of Form 
at a Glance lying about somewhere or other, but it 
would probably be easier to find half-a-dozen books 
dealing with the sports of South Sea Islanders than 
half-a-dozen dealing with the sports of Englishmen. 
Yet it is almost certain that games and sport play a 
far more important part in the life of the average 
Englishman than in the life of the average South 
Sea Islander. 

Napoleon described the English as a nation of 
shopkeepers. He would have come nearer the 
truth if he had described them as a nation of goal- 
keepers. There has never been another nation 
which could to the same extent forget the vexations 
of life in the contemplation of a small ball or in the 
very rumour of a number of horses galloping in a 
bunch a hundred miles away. 

Ancient Rome may have been as unanimous in 
its passion for gladiatorial combats, and Spain may 
be equally so in its intoxication with bull-fights. 
133 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

But these are the amusements of spectators, not of 
players. The EngUshman is both an eager spectator 
and an eager player. 

The only great English game in which the average 
spectator does not take a player's part, at least in 
his daydreams, is horse-racing. Cricket, football, 
golf, hockey, tennis and rowing are no mere 
spectacles. They are the chief occupation of the 
greater part of the youth of the country outside 
business hours, and nearly everybody has at one 
time or another taken an active part in them. 

They mean more to the general public than do the 
churches. They mean more, except at an occasional 
crisis, than politics. 

There are thousands of people who care very 
little about saving the State, and a good deal less 
about saving their souls, who spent most of their 
evenings last summer angrily explaining how to 
save the situation in the rest of the Test Matches. 

Their seriousness in the matter was delightful. I 
met a grey-haired man in gold-rimmed glasses after 
the Nottingham match. "It's a tragedy," he said, 
shaking his head — *' nothing short of a tragedy." 
The word " disaster" could scarcely have been used 
more frequently if there had been an eruption of 
Etna destroying a hundred thousand people. 

That is typical of the intensity with which games 

are being played and, as people say, "followed" 

all over England. The new evangel is the evangel 

of sport. I have heard it maintained that there 

134 



SPORT 

were ten Englishmen who could have given you the 
names of the Australian players in England last 
year for one who could have given you the names 
of the Cabinet Ministers of the moment. The 
captain of the Australians was a real person to a far 
greater number of people than was the head of any 
of the English Churches. 

There has probably never been a more varied 
orgy of sport in any country than has been witnessed 
in England during the past two years during May 
and June. There is the Derby ; there are the golf 
championships ; there is cricket ; there is the lawn 
tennis at Beckenham ; there is the polo at Hurling- 
ham ; there is boxing somewhere else. It is as 
though men were attempting to forget all the hateful 
conflicts of recent times in the delightful conflicts 
of games. They have lived through the long winter 
of war and are celebrating a too-long delayed Easter. 

Pessimists declare that all these games are funeral 
games — that what we are now spectators of are 
the funeral games of civilisation. It may be so. 
Optimists, on the other hand, declare that the 
universal revival of interest in sport is a fine thing, 
and that it is a sign of the essential health and 
soundness of those who remain alive. This, again, 
may be so. It is hardly open to question that the 
ideal of sportsmanship is a good ideal. It ennobles 
the human body. It is social. It is even moral. 
It implies not only the great virtues of determina- 
tion and courage. It also implies the capacity to 

135 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

accept defeat with smiling self-control. This, we 
may grant, is not implied in such a sport as the 
shooting of live pigeons or even the shooting of live 
pheasants. But the great popular sports do seem 
to give us better than anything else that " moral 
equivalent of war" that was demanded by William 
James. 

Not that sport in itself is a preventive of war. 
The peoples most given to sport in the past have 
been the peoples most successful in war. Wellington 
declared that the battle of Waterloo was won on the 
playing-fields of Eton, and during the last war the 
English regiment that went into action in 1914 
trundling an Association football was illustrative of 
the way in which Englishmen had prepared them- 
selves for fighting by learning to shoot goals rather 
than by learning to shoot human beings. 

Most of the soldiers, however, were anxious to get 
back to their games at the earliest possible moment. 
There was never a war in which so few of the fighters 
regarded war as itself the best of sports, as one 
gathers the early Mr Kipling did. The soldiers 
themselves were, for the most part, clear enough on 
this point : that it was infinitely more natural and 
infinitely more pleasant for men to play cricket 
than to kill each other. 

Sir William Beach Thomas suggested last year 

that one of the causes of the insurrection in Ireland 

was the fact that young Irishmen do not play 

cricket and football. This expresses a character- 

136 



SPORT 

istically English point of view. But Sir William 
was wrong in taking for granted that, because the 
Irish do not play cricket, they do not play games. 
As a matter of fact, especially in Munster, they are 
almost as enthusiastically addicted to games as 
Englishmen, and no one can see them playing hurl- 
ing or Gaelic football without realising where they 
acquired the gifts that have made them famous as 
shock troops in war. 

The Irish, like the English, public is a sporting 
public. Sinn Feiner and Orangemen alike delight 
in the rivalry of the horse race. A journalist ar- 
rived in a little town in the west of Ireland during 
the recent troubles, hoping to find the Sinn Fein 
Courts sitting, as he wished to describe one for his 
paper. He learned, however, that the sittings had 
been suspended as the judges themselves wished to 
attend a local race-meeting. 

That also, I think, revealed a healthy and ad- 
mirable spirit. It was a reminder that man is a 
social animal, and that, even under the threat of 
innumerable penalties, he feels that he has a natural 
claim to happiness among his fellows. Horse races 
are obviously not a substitute for justice, but there 
is a good deal to be said for a mingling of justice 
with horse races, and I doubt whether the House of 
Commons shows any signs of moral improvement 
since it ceased to adjourn for the Derby. Members 
of Parliament might be very much worse employed 
than in attending the Derby. They usually are. 

137 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

At the same time there is need for balance in all 
things, and it is just as possible to have too much 
sport as to have too much literature. It is a waste 
of time to read too many novels, and it is a waste of 
time to read too many sporting papers. 

There are two daily papers published in England 
which are devoted entirely to sport, and which, 
though they cost twopence a copy, are read assidu- 
ously by thousands of persons who never even 
glance at the Parliamentary debates. Probably, 
however, these papers owe most of their readers, as 
the financial papers do, to the love of money rather 
than to the love of sport. The interest of the bet is 
greater than the interest of the race. 

That is the weakness of horse-racing as a sport. 
Not that I agree with the Puritanical case against 
betting. It seems to me that to lay a bet that one 
can easily afford to lay is a perfectly legitimate 
amusement. On the other hand, to dream of mak- 
ing money by betting, as so many men do, and 
to take it so seriously as to neglect for its sake 
Shakespeare and one's wife and children, is the folly 
of folUes. Betting of this absorbing kind is what 
the vulgar call " a mug's game." The Lancashire 
bookmaker who, on his retirement, built a row of 
houses out of his earnings and called it Mugs' Row 
was a true critic of the fellow-creatures out of whom 
he had made his fortune. 

But it is possible to be excessively absorbed even 
in those sports that make no appeal to avarice. 

138 



SPORT 

Sport is a pastime, not the chief end of man, and it is 
not nearly so glorious a sign as many people have 
contended that, in a world that needs to be recon- 
structed all round, tens of thousands of people are 
utterly indifferent to any sort of reconstruction but 
the reconstruction of English cricket. Mr Douglas, 
the English captain in the first Test Matches, was 
subjected to a far fiercer fire of criticism in many 
an English home than Mr Lloyd George, the English 
Prime Minister. A Chancellor of the Exchequer 
can fumble incompetently with a million pounds 
amid general apathy, while a fielder who fumbles 
with the ball becomes the object of " barracking." 
Hence one has a vague hope that the keenness 
with which sport is at present being followed will 
gradually be extended to other forms of human 
activity. The Apostle Paul attempted to introduce 
the excitement of a race into the religious life, and 
it would be well if men dreamed as enthusiastically 
about goals in politics as about goals in football. 
The present political world is like a football field 
in which there are no goal-posts, and in which the 
chief player has hidden the ball under his jersey. 
It will not be long, many people hope, till the 
spectators indignantly demand the return of their 
money. 



139 



XVII 
BUS TICKETS 

I FOUND a little girl sitting with an extremely 
laborious air at a table laden with bus and 
tram tickets. She had an account-book on 
the table, and she took up one ticket after another, 
looked at the letters on it, and made a note of its 
value, its alphabetical denomination, its colour, 
and how many copies she possessed, in the book. 

She had already filled pages with lists that read 
like this : 



d. 






li 


Az. flesh 






Cz. flesh 






Uk. white 






Qh. orange-and-white 






Vv. orange-and-white 




2 


Fg. blue 






Pb. blue-red 






Vd. white-red 






Vq. white 





I inquired into her object in wasting her time 
on such ridiculous trifles, for it seemed to me the 
sort of thing great business men, rather than little 
140 



BUS TICKETS 

children, do. Unhappily, she could give me no 
rational explanation of her amusement. She merely 
laughed as she went on with her work, and said: 
" Oh, it's lovely ! " Possibly, a business man 
would give more or less the same answer if you asked 
him to explain a row of his ledgers. The ledger, no 
doubt, is the business man's alternative to collecting 
butterflies. 

There was another thing that puzzled me, how- 
ever, in the little girl's catalogue of bus tickets. 

You will have noticed that, though she has made 
a scrupulous record of the letters at the top of each 
ticket, she has ignored the numbers. This was to 
my mind a grave flaw, because the first thing I read 
on a bus ticket is the number. I am what some 
people would call superstitious about numbers. If 
I see AmlOOl on my ticket I feel, " That's all right." 
If I see FJ2933 I have a touch of gloom, and 
meditate on possible catastrophes. If I see XqOOlS 
I brighten up as] at a stroke of good luck, and 
should not be surprised on reaching home to find 
a cheque or a friend dropped in to tea. You may, 
as other people do, call this superstitious, but that 
is probably because you believe in picking up pins 
instead of in numbers. There is a good deal to be 
said for pins, but I have always looked on them 
as common. 

I cross-examined the child rather keenly as to 
her reasons for taking so extraordinary a step as to 
leave out the numbers, which may at least be made 
141 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

to mean something, and to leave in the letters, which 
mean absolutely nothing. 

" Oh," she replied, " the numbers don't mean 
anything. The letters are the names of the 
tickets." 

" But how," I demanded, " can they be names if 
they don't spell anything ? " 

" But they do," she said. 

"What does this spell?" I asked her, taking up 
a flesh-coloured ticket called " Cz." 

She made a noise rather like a wasp — well, it was 
as much like a wasp as like a serpent. 

"And this one?" I continued, pointing to 
orange-and- white " Qh." 

She imitated a duck that had had its vocal 
chords removed. 

As for the blue " Fg," it wasn't exactly " Ifg," 
and it wasn't exactly " Fig," and it wasn't exactly 
" Fgih." To hear its name pronounced was to have 
an eerie feeling as though one were approaching 
some curious borderland — as though one might at 
any moment utter the keyword that would precipi- 
tate one into the world of the fourth dimension. 
When it came to " Zw," not only did I dislike the 
queer colour of the ticket, but I shrank from asking 
the pronunciation of its name. I do not dabble in 
the Black Art. 

Still, the conversation with the child was not, as 
Wordsworth would have said, without its uses. It 
taught me — what I had never realised before — that 
142 



BUS TICKETS 

even a bus ticket has a personality, and can be 
called by a name, which is the beginning of poetry. 

The British Museum should take the earliest pos- 
sible steps to get hold of this small girl's catalogue. 
It is in all probability the fullest catalogue of 
twentieth-century bus and tram tickets extant. 



143 



XVIII 
I AM TAKEN FOR A PICKPOCKET 

PISA. . . . You probably have a vision of a 
leaning tower — a queer tower tilted like a 
wedding-cake with which a tipsy best man 
has collided. I have known men become seasick at 
sight of the leaning tower. . . . 

But, perhaps, I am prejudiced against Pisa. 
When you are threatened with arrest as a pickpocket 
by policemen dressed up to the ears in rifles and 
revolvers you need to be a philosopher indeed to 
dwell appreciatively on the beauty of a leaning 
tower. I confess I am neither a philosopher nor a 
pickpocket. I live in a sort of neutral zone between 
the two. I could have forgiven the Pisan police if 
they had mistaken me for a philosopher. To mis- 
take me for a pickpocket was stupid. I am not 
well enough dressed for a pickpocket. 

This is how it happened. There was a wild mob 
of pilgrims rushing along the platform in one 
direction to catch the train for Rome. There was 
another wild mob, consisting largely of myself and 
four heavy bags, rushing in the opposite direction 
to catch the train for Florence. One of the friends 
with whom I was travelling — an extremely respect- 
144 



I AM TAKEN FOR A PICKPOCKET 

able man with money and a beard — had fought his 
way ahead of me till he reached the steps of the train. 
I was close on his heels going up the steps when a 
large, fat dandy charged me with his shoulder and 
took my place in the procession. 

I mounted the steps slowly, bag by bag, only to 
find that the carriage was full. There was a longish 
corridor, however, connecting it with the next 
carriage, and I saw that my friend had passed along 
this and was standing at the far end of it. I set 
down my bags and remained in the corridor. 

A moment later, on looking in his direction, I 
noticed that he was feeling in his breast-pocket with 
the agitated air of a man who has lost something. 
An Italian standing by him noticed it, too, spoke 
to him, got an answer, flung down the window, 
and howled for the police. Then the hurricane fell. 
Policemen dashed into the train with excited eyes. 
Civilians followed with excited cries. They rushed 
up to my friend and stood clamouring before him 
like the Tower of Babel rocking in an earthquake. 
I alone remained in the corridor guarding the four 
bags. 

I do not know what questions the policemen 
asked. They must have asked my friend either 
where he had been robbed or by whom he had been 
robbed. The next thing of which I was aware was 
that he was pointing his arm vigorously down the 
corridor, of which I was the only occupant. I may 
say, in order to spare his feelings, that he is a little 
^ 145 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

short-sighted, and probably did not know that I 
was standing there. 

His gesture was enough for the poUce. They 
came over to me, glared into my face, and, one after 
the other, yelled " Descendi ! " at me, gesticulating 
towards the platform. I was — well, " taken aback " 
is too mild a phrase. I instantly became speechless 
in six languages. The police had revolvers at their 
belts, and a command of Italian. I had no revolver, 
and practically all the Italian I knew was a line from 
Dante, meaning " Abandon hope, all ye who enter 
here," a remark of Galileo's about the movement of 
the earth, and " dolce far niente." 

To have said any of these things would only have 
infuriated the police, and anyhow I could remember 
none of them in the suddenness of the attack. 
Once more the terrible strangled duet was repeated, 
" Descendi." And all I could do was to stand where 
I was in helpless silence. Not that I was frightened. 
I was far too busy trying to remember the Italian 
for " friend." Ultimately, just as the police seemed 
on the point of becoming inarticulate in their 
attempts to order me off the train — to what dark 
cell I knew not — I recovered two words of French, 
two of Irish, two of English, and one of Italian, and 
slowly uttered the sentence, " Je suis cara leis the 
other gentiluomo" (I am the other man's friend). 

That gave them pause. They felt instinctively 
that no pickpocket could have talked such gibberish. 
There were mutters of interrogation among the 
146 



I AM TAKEN FOR A PICKPOCKET 

crowd, some saying that I was an Englishman, and 
others that I was a Czecho- Slovak. My words 
had certainly a calming effect on the police, till 
someone said: " Inglese ? " and I replied: "Non, 
Irlandese," at which one of the policemen darted 
such a look of suspicion at me that I felt sure the 
arrest was coming at last. 

He stayed on the train as far as Empoli, and every 
now and then, as I was looking out dreamily at the 
cypress-covered hills, I would be startled with a tap 
on my shoulder and a question in Italian that 
sounded like " Whose wife are you ? " or " Have 
you seen the gardener's penknife ? " Not having 
my phrase-book about me, I always answered: 
" Si, si. . . ." 

Ah, yes, romantic people may think of Pisa as 
the place with the leaning tower ! But my friend 
remembers it only as a place where he was robbed 
of a thousand lire, and I as the railway junction 
in which the police wanted to run me in as a 
pickpocket. 



147 



XIX 

THE NEW HALF-CROWN 

THE only thing to be said in favour of the 
new half-crown is that it is worth sixpence 
more than the new two-shilling piece. If, 
indeed, either of them is worth anything. When I 
passed one at a tobacconist's on the first day of their 
issue, I should have been only half-surprised if the 
police had been sent for. 

The new half-crown looks too good to be true. It 
has the look of shining innocence you see on the face 
of a small boy who is telling lies. It was once said 
of somebody that he looked more like a gentleman 
than a gentleman ought to look, and that he dressed 
more like a gentleman than a gentleman ought to 
dress. That is the mistake of the new half-crown. 
It looks more like a half-crown than a half-crown 
ought to look. 

It is said that it will buy as much as the old half- 
crown, and one hopes for the best. But one was 
told the same thing about paper money. People 
who hoarded gold in the early days of the war were 
not only denounced as unpatriotic, but laughed at 
as fools. But, whatever may be thought of his 
patriotism, the man who was faithful to his gold has 
148 



THE NEW HALF-CROWN 

the laugh on his side now. The pound of gold is 
worth more than the pound of paper as surely as a 
pound of lead is heavier than a pound of feathers, or 
is it the other way about ? One knew these things 
thirty years ago. 

It seems to me that something should be done to 
redress the balance in favour of those who did not 
hoard. 

I, for one, have never hoarded gold. Even before 
the war, I would rather have lost a sovereign, or 
even given it in charity, than not have got rid of it 
somehow or other. 

But now I am at a disadvantage compared with 
the man who secreted sovereigns. The paper pound 
is a liar. It is not a pound at all. It is a partially 
dishonoured cheque. 

If I were Chancellor of the Exchequer I would 
have all these paper notes withdrawn and reissued 
with the real value stamped on them as on the new 
railway tickets. It might not be a bad thing to do 
the same with the silver and copper coinage. Why 
not call the new half-crown a shilling, and the new 
shilling fourpence-halfpenny ? It would solve a 
number of economic difficulties, and would prevent 
employers from fancying that they were ruining 
themselves by paying enormous wages. 

This, however, is more than we can reasonably 

hope for. Under Coalition Government you are 

lucky to get even an imitation half-crown. You are 

lucky not to get a bad half-crown. The ideal of a 

149 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Coalition is to produce something that is neither 
gold nor silver, but that has the deceptive sheen of 
cheap jewellery — a coin that is neither base nor true, 
but will pass. 

Mr Pinchbeck, of Clerkenwell, was its father. It 
is said that, when Mr Pinchbeck invented his famous 
imitation gold, the jewellers were unable for a time 
to sell any real gold watches. But, alas for Mr 
Pinchbeck, the world ultimately gets back to the 
taste for realities, and all he had to give it was an 
imitation and an adjective 1 

I hope the Coalition will give it as much as an 
adjective. It has certainly given us the imitation. 
I have it in my pocket. What am I to do with it ? 
Anyone can have it for the worth — in bitter beer — 
of a pre-war shilling. 



150 



XX 

MY HAT 

THERE are several things to be said about 
my hat. First of all it is not a top-hat. 
I have worn a top-hat only on two occa- 
sions, and then I had to borrow it from a man 
whose head was smaller than my own. 

I wore it the first time for the sake of a friend 
who was being married, and who, having boasted 
all his life of being the most disreputably dressed 
man in Europe, became anxious at the last moment 
that his equally disreputable friends should do him 
credit in the church, and should look as respectable, 
if not as men of fashion, at least as mutes at a 
funeral. 

I still owe him a grudge for insisting on the 
top-hat. 

It sat on my head not exactly like the leaning 
tower of Pisa, for the leaning tower of Pisa takes up 
one position and maintains the same angle against 
all the winds that blow. This extraordinary hat 
assumed a fresh position at the breeze from the 
wings of every passing fly. 

It slid about my head like a goose on ice. Though 
there was no wind blowing, it dipped and rocked like 
151 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

a ship in a heavy sea every time either I or the cab 
horse moved. 

Eventually, as I was getting out of the hansom at 
the church door, it made a supreme effort and glided 
down over my forehead, coming to rest in an uneasy 
position over my left eye. 

I am afraid I did not make a good impression 
on the bride's relatives. I comfort myself with the 
reflection, however, that just then I did not, at 
least, look like a mute at a funeral. 

But there is no such thing as a tolerable hat. 
Not, at least, among new hats. Every hat is born 
ugly. It looks as though it had been designed by 
a plumber. 

Experience alone can subdue it to the tinge of a 
nightingale's wing, the crumpled appearance of an 
autumn chestnut leaf, the battered look of a thing 
that has lived not wisely but too well. 

Many years ago when I bought a new hat I used 
always to hope for rain, and nothing pleased me 
better than to go for a walk in a downpour that 
would reduce it to a ruin in twenty minutes. 

If anyone accidentally knocked my hat off a peg 
in a restaurant, and kicked it along the floor, instead 
of listening to his apologies I thanked him cour- 
teously. If it flew off in the street, and bus horses 
passed over it, other people might laugh, but I 
laughed more triumphantly than they. 

I shall never forget my glow of pride when one 
day in a restaurant an actor whom I did not know 
152 



MY HAT 

came up to me and said with awe in his voice : 
" Where did you get that hat ? " 

He asked me to sell him my hat. He said that he 
had been round all the hatshops of London, but 
that he had not been able to find anything even 
distantly resembling it. 

It was not that he had any ambition to wear it, 
he admitted, but he had a part in a new play at His 
Majesty's, and his success depended entirely on his 
being able to get the right hat. 

I sent it to him the next day by post, and, a 
fortnight later, my hat made its first appearance 
on the stage of a West End theatre. My feelings of 
gratification were not unmixed when I discovered 
that the character who wore it like a symbol was an 
artist who was not only consumptive, but had the 
loosest possible morals, if he could be said to have 
any morals at all. Since then I have been much 
more particular about what happens to my old 
hats. . . . 

Let me assure those who envy me, however, that 
you have not to spoil the shape of your hat deliber- 
ately in order to make it wearable. If you are one 
of those good-natured people who automatically 
assess themselves too high on income-tax forms 
your hat will assume a careless air of beggary a 
fortnight after you have purchased it. If, on the 
other hand, you are one of those quiet, cautious 
people who habitually cheat the Income Tax 
Commissioners a bowler hat will last you five 
153 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

years, and will still look respectable at the end 
of it. 

The hat is a great revealer of character. If I 
were a phrenologist I should look not at a man's 
bumps, but at his hat. . . . 

All this is merely to lead up to the fact that I 
am about to buy a new hat. Shall it be a bowler ? 
Just for this once ? 



154 



XXI 

EATING 

SHE was quite young. She was as charming 
as a spring day — a creature of gold and blue. 
She was, I think, newly married. She was 
sitting opposite a young man in a restaurant car 
on a train going North. They were waiting for 
luncheon to come, and she talked in a loud, ringing 
voice, either to drown the noise of the wheels or 
because he was a little deaf. 

She took up the menu and cast her eye down it. 

" The lunch looks good," she remarked, in a voice 
that sailed right down the car. And, when the 
young man mumbled something, as if he had not 
heard, she repeated in a louder voice : "I say the 
lunch looks quite good." 

He mimibled something again. 

" I enjoyed dinner last night," she confided to 
him in the same robust tones ; " didn't you ? " 

More mumbling. 

"The boiled salmon," she megaphoned to him, 
" was excellent." 

The waiter came along with a plate of fish in every 
crook of his arm, and set two plates before them. 

"I'm glad it's turbot," she shouted to the young 
X55 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

man. " If you don't count salmon, turbot's my 
favourite fish. What's yours?" 

His reply was inaudible. Everything, indeed — 
even the train — everything except what the young 
lady said — was inaudible. 

She took up a roll and broke it in her hands. 

" The rolls are quite nice," she called across. " I 
like them like this — not too fresh, and crisp without 
being stale." 

A meat dish followed. She cut off a little corner 
of beef and chewed it thoughtfully for a few moments. 
She gave a little nod of commendation. 

" The beef is excellent," her comment rang out. 
"Do you like horse-radish with roast beef? Or 
don't you? I don't. I hate it." 

She smiled genially at her little peculiarity. 

Then, becoming serious again, she shouted across 
the table : "What do you think of the cabbage? " 

I don't know what he answered. She didn't give 
him much time to answer, but went on : 

" Did you like those beans last night ? I always 
like beans. Except when they're stringy. Do you 
like broad beans or French beans best? I like 
broad beans. I think I like nearly any vegetable. 
Except vegetable marrow. It gets so soppy." 

I thought this was all she was going to say about 
the second course, but her voice pealed out again : 

"You've taken very few potatoes. Aren't you 
fond of them ? I am. Especially when they're 
nice and floury. Like these." 
156 



EATING 

The train entered a tunnel just as the apple-tart 
came round, and made such an uproar that the 
greater part of her commentary on the sweets was 
inaudible. But, as we emerged from the tunnel, the 
first human sound I heard was a woman's shriek : 

" This — pastry's — delicious." 

I felt by this time that either the lady was 
labouring under a very serious delusion, or I was. 
The meal seemed to me to be a very ding-dong affair 
— the sort of meal one works one's way through, 
and the less said about it the better. When the 
waiter came round with the biscuits and cheese I 
chose the most attractive of the biscuits in order to 
put as pleasant an end as possible to an indifferent 
luncheon. 

The waiter passed on to where the lady sat. 

She looked through the various biscuits, and sang 
out to the young man : 

" Halloa ! Digestive biscuits ! Are you fond of 
digestive biscuits ? I am. There's only one left. 
Won* t you have it ? Then I will. If you had said 
' Yes,' I honestly think I would have murdered 
you." 

Alas ! I was beginning to be able to foretell the 
conversation. 

She boomed : " The cheese is good." 

She boomed : " The coffee is excellent." 

She signalled to the waiter a few minutes later, 
and he came up to her. 

" Waiter," she said confidentially, in a voice that 

157 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

would have filled Drury Lane, " the food on this 
train is awfully good." 

He grimaced, wrinkled his face appreciatively, 
and went about his business. 

She leaned across the table and shouted to the 
young man : 

" I was saying to the waiter that the food on this 
train is awfully good." 

The young man grinned vacuously and nodded. 

She subsided in her chair and closed her eyes for 
a few minutes. Then she half-opened them again 
and murmured across the table like the wind in a 
cave : 

" Do you remember the peche Melba last night ? 
I never can make up my mind which is my real 
favourite — piche Melba or meringues. Can you ? 
I think piche Melba.'' 

Her eyes closed again. She slept. And, as she 
slept, she had the face of a child — a nice greedy 
child. 



158 



XXII 
ON WEARING A COLLAR 

WHEN I was in the House of Lords for 
the opening of ParUament by the King 
I was given a double sheet of fair white 
foolscap, beautifully printed, setting out the details 
of the ceremonial. 

It was evidently meant to be a guide for Peers, 
and it ended with the sentences : 

"The Knights of the several Orders are to wear 
their respective Collars. 
"Full dress with trousers." 

It seemed to me odd that Peers should need 
such a reminder, absent-minded though several 
of them — like the late Duke of Devonshire — have 
been. 

I should not have been surprised, on the other 
hand, if the Lord Chamberlain, in sending me a card 
of admission, had enclosed a little note, marked 
" Private," begging me not to forget my collar or 
trousers or both. 

For one thing, I have no valet, and a man with- 
out a valet is rather helpless. There are so many 
things to remember — shaving-brush, tooth-brush, 
159 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

bath, vest, shirt, pants, trousers, waistcoat, coat, 
collar, tie, studs, links, hair-brush, clothes-brush, 
boots, hat — but the list is endless. It is amazing 
that accidents do not happen more often. 

A few days ago I succeeded in remembering the 
shaving-brush, and spent several minutes producing 
a really beautiful lather according to the directions 
on the paper wrapped round the soap. Having done 
this, however, I forgot to shave, and it was only 
when I was in the bath, and the lather half washed 
off, that I realised what an absent-minded fool I was. 
Could a Peer have done worse ? 

As for the clothes-brush, I have, in the American 
phrase, no use for it. It seems to me to be asking 
too much of human nature to expect a busy man 
to be constantly thinking about the most useless 
article in any civilised household. Besides, it is 
perfectly easy to get clothes of a colour and pattern 
that more or less absorb the dust. To brush clothes 
like mine would be so superfluous as to be merely the 
hobby of vain and idle men. 

Oddly enough — if the grammarians will allow the 
phrase — I do not remember ever to have forgotten 
to wear a collar, except deliberately. That was 
when I was nominally a student and shortly after 
I had become a passionate advocate of democracy. 
I do not know why at the age of eighteen it should 
seem democratic to wear a neck-cloth instead of a 
collar, and a corduroy cap, and to smoke plug tobacco 
in a clay pipe with the red hand of Ulster embossed 
i6o 



ON WEARING A COLLAR 

on the bowl. It was certainly a dubious advertise- 
ment for Socialism, and merely served to convince 
anyone who took notice that one's creed was the 
result of mental disorder. 

I remember also making it a point never to shave 
on Sundays. It seemed to me monstrous that the 
middle classes should all look so extremely respect- 
able on Sunday that no one who was not equally 
respectable would dare to be seen in the same church 
with them. Hence, I decided to make my tiny 
contribution to the brotherhood of man by reducing 
the respectability of the church I attended so far as 
was in my power. I could think only of two ways — 
to turn up late, and to turn up unshaved. I carried 
out my programme with all the greater ardour 
because I detested early rising on any day, and 
particularly on Sunday, and as for shaving, even 
now, if there were any alternative to it except 
growing a beard, I should never let a razor into 
the house. 

Times have changed, however, and I with them. 
You will no longer see me on a Sunday morning 
standing up in the back pew, looking like a long, 
cadaverous gaol-bird who has just recovered from 
a wasting illness in a Bolshevik hospital. 

It may be that I discovered that, in order to look 
disreputable, I had no need to put myself about. 
Even my best efforts would lower the tone of any 
religious gathering ever held in these islands. 

I undoubtedly cut a sorry figure among all those 
L i6i 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

peers in their scarlet robes and peeresses in their 
jewels. 

Even to be among them, however, reminded me 
somehow of my lost youth. I suppose it was the 
reference to collars, I, too, have lived in Arcadia. 



162 



XXIII 
ON BEING SHY 

I AM naturally shy. I should never dare to 
ride a pig down Park Lane, as Lord Charles 
Beresford did. I should feel that people were 
looking. The presence of a single housemaid would 
unnerve me. 

But even that does not give the full measure of my 
shyness. I cannot sit on a char-a-banc and sing or 
blow a trumpet or wave a flag without feeling self- 
conscious. Not, at least, while passing through a 
village. I feel that the eyes of every villager, 
from the crooked old man of ninety down to the 
baby dropping its india-rubber doll over the side 
of the perambulator, are concentrated on me with 
a burning-glass intensity. As for dancing in the 
street to a mouth-organ during a halt outside an 
inn, I simply cannot do it. 

Not that I do not see all the arguments on the 
other side. I say to myself : " What does it matter 
if people see you — people who don't know you and 
who wouldn't like you if they did — people for whom 
you did not exist yesterday and for whom you will not 
exist to-morrow ? You are a gross egotist to behave 
as though you were the supreme interest of their lives." 
163 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

But it is no use. Man is not a reasonable animal. 
At least, I am not. 

I felt this acutely in Rome when I had to throw 
a penny into the Trevi Fountain. "Had to" is 
perhaps a rather strong expression, but everybody 
tells you that, if you go to Rome, you must throw 
money into the Trevi Fountain if you want to be 
sure of coming back again. 

I was with a friend who is superstitious in these 
matters. On our last evening in Rome, with only 
a short time left to catch the train, he suddenly 
exclaimed : " Good heavens ! we have forgotten to 
throw anything into the fountain." 

I am not superstitious, but I confess my heart 
sank, because I wanted to return to Rome. 

I had resigned myself to destiny, however, when 
he seized me by the arm and, with set face, said : 
" We must have a taxi." 

He is a man of musical culture, and, as we 
jumped into the taxi, he called out to the driver: 
"Prestissimo!" "Prestissimo" in Rome means: 
" Drive on as many sides of the street as you like. 
Spare the children if you can, but you may run 
over older people within reason. Anyhow, get there 
as quickly as possible." 

It was a terrible experience, but we got there. 

My friend at once leaped out of the taxi, stepped 
lightly down the steps to the fountain, and threw his 
money into the water. 

As for me, my blood froze when I saw what I had 
164 



ON BEING SHY 

let myself in for. I had not realised that there is 
always a crowd of people at the fountain — old 
women taking a rest, children playing, soldiers 
smoking, persons of all sorts gossiping — and that it 
is all but impossible to throw a penny into the water 
unobserved. Never before did I feel such exaspera- 
tion at the spectacle of idle humanity. Half Rome 
seemed to be there. It made one's small act of 
homage as public a performance as a music-hall turn. 

" Hurry up I " said my friend. 

My hand was in my pocket, clutching a penny, 
but I positively could not take it out before so many 
people. 

I surveyed the statuary of the fountain with a 
pretence at archaeological interest. 

" Don't be a coward," he said ; " the taxi's 
ticking up lire while you're making up your mind." 

I would gladly have disowned him. I crept 
slowly nearer the water, my gaze still fixed on the 
statues. When I reached the water's edge, I leaned 
over and looked into it, my heart going pit-a-pat 
with excitement. I did not yet dare to throw in the 
penny. 

"We'll miss the train," said my friend im- 
patiently ; " get it over." 

I turned away from the fountain as though I had 
seen all I wanted to see. I did my best to look 
cool, but I was trembling with stage fright. Just 
as I turned to go, however, I made a dexterous pass 
with my hand, pretended to be brushing something 
165 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

off my coat, and with shaking fingers juggled the 
coin into the water. 

As I walked up the steps to the taxi, I felt as 
small as a schoolboy who has made a fool of himself 
in public and knows it. It could not have been 
a more trying ordeal if people had been watching 
me through opera-glasses from all the surrounding 
windows. Yet there was no comment, no applause, 
no booing. I doubt if a single person had taken 
the slightest notice of me. 

"Prestissimo!" said my friend to the driver 
again. 

I did not feel safe till we got to the station. 
The driver saw to that. 



i66 



XXIV 
A SMALL BOY'S APPETITE 

I AM relieved that the heat-wave has broken. 
I disHke great heat because of its effect on 
chocolate biscuits. It makes them melt in 
the hand. When the hand happens to belong to a 
small boy put into one's charge for a long railway 
journey, the results are so appalling that one has 
to go for a parallel to the leopard that could not 
change his spots and the Ethiopian who found it 
equally impossible to change his skin. 

His mother said to me : " You're sure you don't 
mind ? It's so good of you. He'll be met at the 
station. Johnny darling, this kind gentleman will 
keep you safe. I've brought these few biscuits in 
case he feels hungry." And she thrust into my 
hands — nay, into my arms — a large paper bag 
containing a pound of chocolate biscuits. 

The air in the carriage was so stifling that fat men 
looked like pieces of lard slowly melting away on 
frying-pans. We were sitting five a side, divided 
between hatred of the blazing afternoon sun and 
hatred of each other. We fanned ourselves with 
the evening papers which we were too feeble to read. 
It was an atmosphere in which the sight of anything 
167 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

sweet, even of a lump of sugar, would have affected 
you like a rough cross-Channel passage. 

The train had hardly left the station when the 
little chap looked up at me with a broad face 
beaming with appetite and said : " I'm hungry." 

I am not accustomed to children in railway trains, 
so I said : " Don't you think . . . ? Would your 
mother . . . ? Better keep the biscuits, don't you 
think, till we get past Clapham Junction." 

His face, which had been broad, suddenly became 
long, and it came over me with horror that he might 
begin to cry. 

" Well," said I, holding out the bag to him, " just 
one." 

He drew out a long brown finger-shaped biscuit, 
and as he gripped it in his little hot hand and began 
munching it his face reverted from a crescent to a 
full moon. 

I fought for his soul, biscuit by biscuit, for the 
first thirty miles of the journey. But it was no use. 
Always he elongated his face, and always in the end 
he took the biscuit. He ate them of all shapes and 
sizes. You might as well have attempted to stay 
the appetite of a young cuckoo. He ate them with 
both hands. He ate them with all parts of his face 
— with his mouth, with his ears, and with the parts 
of his cheeks just under his eyes. His face was one 
large palette of chocolate stains up to the roots of his 
hair. After the first twenty miles of the journey it 
would have been impossible to tell to what nation- 
i68 



A SMALL BOY'S APPETITE 

ality he belonged. He looked like a mulatto who 
had been adopted into the family of a stoker. 

When he had eaten something like the equivalent 
of his own bulk in chocolate biscuits, he lay back 
in the seat and held up his ten fingers and looked 
at them, beaming as broadly as if he were ready to 
burst. They were certainly well worth looking at. 
There were still little bits of white skin showing, but 
for the rest they were as if gloved in a thick, clammy, 
chocolate mud. 

" Where shall I wipe them ? " he said. 

I asked him if he had not a handkerchief, but he 
hadn't. I was keeping mine for mopping my brow, 
and had no mind to have daubs of brown paint all 
over my face. I looked down at his white socks, 
thought kindly of his mother, and steeled my heart. 

" Wipe them on your socks," I said. 

He did. At least he got rid of some of it on his 
socks. They became piebald. 

He leaned back again and closed his eyes, looking 
rather pale. 

" Oh, I've such a headache," he said, beginning 
to breathe, I thought, rather heavily. " Oh," he 
groaned, " I'd Hke to be at the window." 

"Hurry," I told him, helping him to the floor; 
"go to the window and put your head out. The 
draught will do you good." 

He felt his way to the window, laying his little 
sticky hand on every trouser-leg he passed, while 
each passenger in turn withdrew his knee hurriedly 
169 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

and scowled at me in the belief that I was the child's 
father. 

It is a curiously difficult thing to explain to a 
whole railway-carriageful of people that a child is no 
more your child than theirs ; anyhow I could not 
have spoken for a wild longing to laugh as I watched 
the little fellow making his way along that corridor 
of horrified and shrinking knees. 

Then the old gentleman in the window-seat 
looked at me indignantly over his spectacles and 
said : " Is he going to be sick ? Better change 
places with me, so that you can look after him." 

I am afraid I rather lost my head during the next 
ten miles. At one minute I would persuade the 
child to lean well out of the window, in the hope that 
the breeze would do him good. The next I would 
feel frightened at the thought of his getting a large, 
blinding cinder in his eye, and would pull him back 
into the carriage again. Luckily, when I had done 
these things alternately for close on half-an-hour the 
treatment proved effective, for he looked up into my 
face and said : " I'm feeling better now." 

He sat back on the seat for a minute, then he 
leaned forward and screwed his head round to look 
up at what was left of the bag and the biscuits in 
the rack. The broad beam broke over his countenance 
gain. 

" I'm hungry," he said, gazing up at me. 



T70 



XXV 

HAMPSTEADOPHOBIA 

HAMPSTEADOPHOBIA is a disease common 
among taxi-drivers. The symptoms are 
practically unmistakable, though to a care- 
less eye somewhat resembling those of apoplexy. 

At mention of the word " Hampstead" the driver 
affected gives a start, and stares at you with a look 
of the utmost horror. Slowly the blood begins to 
mount to his head, swelling first his neck and then 
distorting his features to twice their natural size. 

His veins stand out on his temples like bunches of 
purple grapes. His eyes bulge and blaze in their 
sockets. At first, for just a fraction of a second, the 
power of speech deserts him, and one realises that he 
is struggling for utterance only because of the slight 
foam that has formed on his lips. 

As one catches the first words of his returning 
speech, it is borne in upon one that he is pray- 
ing. One cannot make out from the language 
of his prayers whether he is a Christian or a devil- 
worshipper or a plain heathen. It is clear that he 
holds strong religious views of some kind, but he 
seems to be as promiscuous in his worship as an 
ancient Greek. What is still more curious, he 
171 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

seems to pray again and again and again for 
blindness. 

I have often been puzzled as to the explanation 
of this. Is there some legend among taxi-drivers 
about a loathsome monster that lurks in the deeps 
of the Leg of Mutton Pond, and the mere sight of 
which causes madness in men of this particular 
calling ? Or is their terror the result of some old 
story of a taxi-driver who once took a fare to Hamp- 
stead late at night and was never heard of again ? 
Or is it guilty conscience that is at the back of it all ? 

It may, for all I know, be recorded somewhere in 
history that the taxi-drivers once did a great wrong 
to the people of Hampstead — perhaps there was an 
invasion and an attempt to destroy the steep and 
beautiful hill — and are afraid to go there because of 
the vengeance of the inhabitants. 

It is certainly a remarkable fact that while men 
of all other professions visit Hampstead in perfect 
security as a holiday resort, the taxi-drivers alone 
shrink from it as though it were a suburb of Gehenna. 
Do they expect the Spaniard to leap out on them 
with a knife, or the Bull to plunge forth snorting 
and fire-breathing from behind the Bush ? No 
taxi-driver has ever told. I doubt whether anyone 
could extract the truth but a psycho-analyst. 

Something, however, ought to be done. I cannot 

believe that among taxi-drivers the disease of 

Hampsteadophobia is inevitable. I am confident 

that taxi-drivers could be trained in such a way as 

172 



HAMPSTEADOPHOBIA 

to make them as little afraid of the name of 
Hampstead as a horse is nowadays of a steam- 
roller. 

They might be accustomed to the sound of the 
dreaded name little by little. It would take a year, 
probably, to teach them not to start at the first 
whisper of the letter "H." During the second 
year they could proceed from " Ha " to " Ham " and, 
with luck, even to " Hamp." By the end of the 
third year, if a man stealing up behind one of them 
in goloshes and barking into the right ear the 
complete word "Hampstead" — if they were able 
to endure this without the quiver of an eyelid or any 
invocation of supernatural aid, they might then be 
regarded as proof against the disease, and be given 
their licences as taxi-drivers. 

If something of this kind is not done, the disease 
will inevitably spread, and the taxi-drivers at 
railway stations will have to be put into muzzles. 



173 



XXVI 
RETURNING FROM A HOLIDAY 

THERE is no one who hates work more 
bitterly than an Englishman. Travelling 
back to London in the train after the Easter 
holiday, one sees hardly a cheerful face. The trains 
are crowded with men and women looking like vale- 
tudinarians in a specialist's waiting-room. They 
read their papers with the air of people reading 
bad news. Beards droop listlessly. Earrings hang 
like 116-lb. weights. Everybody sits disconsolately 
amid a chaos of luggage and extra passengers like 
a wretched man rescued from a wreck and with no 
certain destination but an iceberg. 

They are obviously all confirmed haters of work. 
They remember, perhaps, that it was Adam's punish- 
ment when he was driven out of Eden. They are 
themselves still hankering after Eden, where nobody 
had ever any work to do. Shakespeare, in describ- 
ing England as " this other Eden," had probably 
in mind the national propensity to idleness. There 
is no other nation that will spend three days from 
noon till eve at a cricket match. There is no other 
nation that to the same extent flocks to the race- 
course and the football field on the working days of 
174 



RETURNING FROM A HOLIDAY 

the week. Napoleon called the English a nation of 
shopkeepers. It was the mistake of his life, and cost 
him his Empire. The English are a nation of play- 
boys who grudge every day that they cannot turn 
into a holiday. 

In order to see people who really enjoy working, 
you have to go abroad to some such country as 
France or Ireland. A Frenchwoman will polish a 
brass knocker or scrub a floor as cheerfully as a lark 
squandering music. Her work is a bubbling song 
that begins long before one is up and goes on, if 
necessary, till long after one has gone to bed. 

In the same way, the Irish navvy carries a weight 
like a joke and pickaxes a road as though he had 
found a new sort of amusement. That is why the 
French and the Irish do not succeed in the world as 
the English do. They take work too lightly. 

In order to succeed in life it is necessary to take 
work with the utmost seriousness. One must hate 
one's job and make it one's object in life to have 
done with it. One must grudge every moment 
spent on it, and save money assiduously in order 
to be able to retire and live in perpetual idleness. 

Englishmen have for centuries idealised the man 
who does no work to such a point that until lately 
they thought no one else fit to be a Cabinet Minister. 
When an Englishman is totally incapable of doing 
any work whatsoever, he describes himself in the 
Income-Tax form as a " gentleman." The manu- 
facture of gentlemen is the English national industry. 
175 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

The gentleman is a person who regards work as a 
vice with such conviction that he denounces almost 
anyone who labours with his hands as a Bolshevik. 
He preaches about the dignity of labour, not to his 
fellow-clubmen, but to savages who are fit for 
nothing else. 

I cannot help sympathising with the Englishman's 
hatred of work. If he liked working, he might have 
remained as cheerfully poor as a Donegal peasant. 
Instead of this, he grumbled, he struck, he became 
a sportsman, he invented bank holidays. England 
is the mother-country of strikes and bank holidays 
— those passionate protests against Adam's curse. 

At the present moment the great argument of the 
English upper classes against Bolshevism is that 
under it everybody is compelled by law to work. 
It is not that Englishmen do not work when they 
have to. They work all the better, perhaps, because 
they wish to get done with it, just as they fight all 
the better because they wish to get done with it. 
" I want to go home" is their song in the workshop 
as in war. 

That grim desire to go home, instead of enjoying 
themselves toiling and fighting like other races, is 
the secret of England's greatness. The Englishman 
surpasses all other white men in the punctuality 
with which he leaves off working. 



176 



XXVII 
JOAN BUBBLE MAKES HER FORTUNE 

JOAN BUBBLE was a telephone girl who could 
not trill the letter " r." 
Not only could she not say "Thr-r-ree 
double thr-r-ee thr-r-ee" ; she could not even say 
" Thr-r-ree double thr-r-ree." 

She had a lisp, and said " Thwee double thwee 
thwee." It was a mystery to everybody how she 
had risen to her position. 

* * * 

Sir Hector M'Whuffle was a lovable old City 
merchant, a tapioca importer, who had voted for 
Sir Frederick Banbury all his life. 

He was old and pink and bald, and was universally 
believed to be of Scottish extraction. Nevertheless, 
he was not happy. 

It seemed as if the tapioca had entered into his soul. 
He had few pleasures left. Indeed he had only two. 
It would be more accurate to say that he had only one. 

Every morning, on arriving at his office, he would 
pass into his private room, lock the door, walk 
briskly to the telephone, take up the receiver and 
ask for the number "Three double three three." 
Sometimes he would ask for " Mayfair 3333," and 

M 177 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

sometimes for "Hop 3333," but, whatever tke 
exchange, the number he asked for was invariably 
" Three double three three." 

He did not know to whom any of these numbers 
belonged, and he did not care. His one remaining 
joy in life was to listen to the echo of his words 
coming back over the wire, pronounced as if by a 
nightingale, "Thr-r-ree double thr-r-ree thr-r-ree." 
It thrilled him. 

On being put through he always inquired in a 
courteous voice, " Is that Buckingham Palace ?" or 
" Is that Lord Curzon ? " so as not to arouse suspicion. 

This had gone on for several years without his 
secrets being discovered. It made Sir Hector happy, 
and it made all the numbers 3333 happy, because it 
is rather nice to be taken for Buckingham Palace or 
Lord Curzon. 

One morning, when Sir Hector took up the 
receiver to make his customary call, Joan Bubble 
happened to be on duty at the other end of the wire. 
There was a smile of expectancy on his face as he 
listened for the echo. . . . 

At first he could not believe his ears. At least 
he could not believe the ear to which he was holding 
the telephone. 

His hand trembled as he repeated the number : 
" Hop three — double — three — three." 

Once more a girl's voice echoed him, like the tweet 
of a tiny willow- wren : " Hop thwee — double 
— thwee — thwee." 

178 



JOAN BUBBLE MAKES HER FORTUNE 

Sir Hector M'Whuffle dropped the receiver and 
walked heavily to his chair. It was as if not only the 
universe, but Scotland, had tumbled in. 

That night he slept little. All through the 
small hours he heard the sound of the wind sing- 
ing "Thwee! Thwee ! Thwee-ee-EE ! " in the 
chimney, and, once, a mouse squeaking " Thwee ! 
Thwee ! Thwee ! ' ' behind the wainscot. 

Next morning Sir Hector had dark rings under 
his eyes. He knew that something must be done, 
because if this sort of thing went on it would kill 
him. He realised that it would be useless to appeal 
to the Postmaster-General, who was notoriously 
unamenable to public opinion. The only thing to 
do was to raise an agitation in the Press, and the 
girl would have to go. 

The news editor on whom he called did not dis- 
miss Sir Hector as a madman. He saw possibilities 
of a news story, and sent out a reporter to discover 
the telephone girl who could not trill the letter " r," 
and to get an interview and a photograph. The 
reporter was a genius, the interview a triumph. 
It was printed in large type under immense head- 
lines, mth a double-column photograph of Joan in 
the middle, and underneath it the lines : 

JOLLY JOAN BUBBLE 
" I lisped in numbers for the numbers came." — Pope. 

She was an amazingly beautiful girl. Sir Hector 
179 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

M'Whuffle, when he opened his paper, stared and 
stared and stared at the photograph. 
* * * 

There was once a telephone girl who could not 
trill the letter "r." 

Not only could she not say "Thr-r-ree double 
thr-r-ee thr-r-ee " ; she could not even say " Thr-r-ree 
double thr-r-ree." 

She had a lisp, and said, "Thwee double thwee 
thwee." 

She became the widow of a rich tapioca merchant 
and lived happily ever after. 



i8o 



XXVIII 
TWO TRAVELLERS WERE TALKING 

ENGROSSED though I was in The Star, I 
could not help overhearing him. He sat 
behind a cigar-stump in the far corner of 
the railway carriage, and from beneath a crisp grey- 
moustache explained how all the religions had their 
origin in the "mediumship" of their founders. 

One sentence especially remained somersaulting 
in my memory. " And then, you know," he in- 
formed his companion in a matter-of-fact tone, " Old 
Moses got the Ten Commandments by automatic 
writing." 

I had not thought of Moses in terms so familiar. 
I suddenly had an absurd vision of him as a worried 
old fellow in baggy trousers and with a straggling 
beard, sitting at a table with his eyes tight shut, and 
gripping a slate-pencil which squeaked out letter by 
letter the stern imperatives to the human race. 

It all came, I think, from calling him " Old Moses." 
Call any of the great figures in history " old this " 
or " old that," and immediately he loses his im- 
pressiveness, and becomes the sort of person who 
might be precipitated into you on the top of a bus. 
Call WilUam the Conqueror " Old WilHam"— or, for 
i8i 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

that matter, " Old Bill " — and he is no longer a 
conqueror, but a man who walks with a waddle. 

Try the same adjective on Pericles, and you no 
longer see the great statesman pacing with the 
dignity of a Sophoclean hero under the temple 
shadows of the violet-crowned city. " Old Pericles," 
on the contrary, is simply a knockabout figure in a 
shabby hat, with bulging paunch and a crease in his 
waistcoat. 

The word " old" in this sense is always the ex- 
pression of a smile. It is jaunty and jocular, and 
brings the greatest down to the level of the street 
corners. To call a man " old " is to slap him on the 
back and, whoever he may be, to lose one's awe or 
terror of him. 

Men are never less afraid of the devil than when 
they call him Old Harry, Old Nick, or — as has been 
done — Old Scratch. It is as though the word " old " 
had a magic effect on those who used it, and stirred 
in their bosoms the warm juices of familiar kindliness. 

It is easy to see the difference that comes over 
one's mood when one applies the word to a living 
man. Get into the habit of calling Mr Lloyd George 
"Old Lloyd George," and it will be impossible to 
feel very bitter against him. He will at once seem 
as playful as a kitten — as bright-eyed as a mis- 
chievous child. Let Tory squires learn to think of 
Mr Philip Snowden as " Old Phil " and they will 
never again be terrified of him as of a lean and 
sinister Robespierre. Irishmen, if they could have 
182 



TWO TRAVELLERS WERE TALKING 

brought themselves to speak of Mr Macpherson as 
" Old Mac," would have found themselves coming 
to look on him, not as a sort of Adelphi villain in 
obtrusively white gloves, but as a rather queer pet. 
Give a man a name, and he will ultimately have to 
live up to it. Call him Samuel Smiles, and he will 
be a Samuel Smiles. Even Mr George R. Sims was 
said by somebody or other to owe everything to the 
" R." in his name. As plain George Sims he would 
obviously have been much too shy to put his 
signature to a hair-restorer. 

On the whole, however, it is better to leave the 
great figures of history and literature cloaked in the 
names that have come down to us. " Old Othello " 
would never have won the stooping ear of Desde- 
mona as Othello did. " Old Savonarola " — or " Old 
Sav."" — would never have lit the bonfire of vanities 
or died a martyr. 

As for "Old Moses" — no, no, it was not he who 
dared to approach the presence in the burning bush. 
"Old Moses" is probably that other character 
concerning whose whereabouts when the light went 
out children have for generations been so inquisitive. 
But he had nothing to do with the Ten Command- 
ments — nothing whatever. That was an entirely 
different person called Moses. You may read all 
about him in the Bible. 



183 



XXIX 

HOW MANY WINDOWS HAS YOUR HOUSE ? 

A SMALL boy of seven was invited to go 
and stay in the country. On getting the 
invitation the first question he asked his 
prospective hostess was : " How many windows has 
your house ? " 

Strange that no one Hving in the house had ever 
thought of that ! We all guessed, but we all guessed 
differently. We all counted up, but we all counted 
up differently. 

It is an exceedingly difficult thing to remember 
all the windows in one^s house. It is not an easy 
thing even to agree as to what is a window and what 
is not. 

Is the pane of glass let into the scullery roof a 
window ? Is the wire-netting that admits a beam 
into the cellar — the oh ! so empty cellar — a 
window ? One does not like to deceive a child of 
seven ; and yet, if his taste in windows is quantita- 
tive rather than qualitative, it would be ungenerous 
not to count as many of them as possible. In the 
end we decided to call the wire-netting a window. 
Perhaps we could not resist a temptation to boast. 
It enabled our house to beat his by one window. 
184 



WINDOWS 

Children are all born with a love of numbers, and 
only lose it when they discover at school what a 
very unpleasant science arithmetic is. What they 
really like is home arithmetic. There is an age at 
which it is a pleasure to count the very stairs in the 
house. 

I suppose it is the exercise of a newly acquired 
faculty that gives children so much enjoyment. 
At any rate, as soon as counting has become an 
easy and commonplace accomplishment, we cease to 
count the stairs. It is one of the pleasures we have 
exhausted by the age of ten. 

I asked a girl of eleven if she ever counted the 
stairs now. " Of course not," she replied coldly. 
" I'm in double figures." 

I could not blame her. I have outlived the 
fascination of numbers myself. I would not walk 
across the road to discover the area in square miles 
of Lake Michigan. I am not sure that I even want 
to know how many sovereigns there are in the Bank 
of England. I doubt if it would be good for me to 
know. 

And yet I feel that both she and I have lost 
something worth having in losing our love of count- 
ing. I should be a happier man if, as I climb to my 
room in Bouverie Street, I could still take pleasure 
in numbering the stairs, whispering those ever- 
charming words, " One, two, three, four, five, six, 
seven," and so on, with rounded lips, till I reached 
the top. 

x85 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

I do not know how many stairs there are in the 
office. I only know that there are too many. 

Yet, if I could but become a child again I should 
enjoy each several stair like a line in a nursery rhyme. 
They would mount one by one into one of those ex- 
quisite counting poems in which nursery literature 
abounds. 

It is absurd that the appreciation of stairs should 
be left entirely to infants. The stairs, as every 
child knows, are one of the most romantic parts of 
the house. This is partly because they invite us to 
count them, partly because of the dangerous animals 
that lurk behind the half-open doors on the way 
down ; and partly because of the banisters. And 
yet for most of us the stairs are as dull as a pro- 
cession of bores, and the only pleasure we get from 
them is that Charlie Chaplin can fall down them. 

Some day, let us hope, an architect will arise who 
will do justice to stairs, and who will design every 
step with an individuality of its own, so that we may 
climb delightedly from the oneness of the universe 
to the nineness of the Nine Muses, and, passing 
beyond the fourteenness of the Fourteen Points, 
may arrive out of breath at the thirty-nineness of 
the Thirty-Nine Articles. The last step in the 
office in which I climb up to my work might be 
made to express the thousand-and-oneness of the 
Thousand and One Nights. Possibly a child would 
like it. I don''t. 



1 86 



XXX 

ON PICTURE POST CARDS 

THE picture post card, they say, is dead. It 
was the last halfpenny that killed it. 
Holidays will never be the same again. 
The great service of the picture post card to 
holiday-makers was that it ceased to matter where 
you went for your holiday, because, wherever you 
went, the picture post cards made it look like 
Paradise. 

You might go down to the beach and find it 
swarming with rather unpleasant-looking children, 
with bits of old newspaper flying about in the wind, 
banana-skins as plentiful as after a feast on a West 
Indian island, and a refuse of tins, tea-leaves and 
cinders pouring, like lava from a volcano, out of the 
back of a row of fishermen's cottages ; but you had 
only to go into the stationer's and look over the local 
picture post cards in order to realise that the children 
were cherubs digging the golden floor of Heaven, 
that their parents were figures in as brilliant and 
animated a scene as Disraeli himself at his most 
ducal ever imagined, that the tins and the tea-leaves 
and the cinders were figments of your own sour and 
fault-finding eye. 

187 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

You might have been meditating an early escape 
home from so squahd a slum, but the picture post 
card reassured you. 

You went back to the beach with a seeing eye. 
You noticed the scarlet sunshades making patterned 
figures like the Great Bear or the Lion in the night 
sky. You began to take pleasure in the movements 
of thousands of little bare legs stained with the sun 
— in the piping of innumerable little bird voices as 
castles were washed down by the waves or houses 
hollowed out of the sands. You saw the sun 
gleaming on golden locks, on freckled noses, or 
frocks infinitely whiter than the whitest butterfly, 
on red and blue and green buckets. 

You discovered that only one newspaper had 
escaped from its rightful owner, that the banana 
skins were few and inconspicuous, and that a 
determined eye could easily decline to see the 
refuse-heap. Thereafter you settled down to enjoy 
yourself. 

Nor is this the end of the benefits conferred by the 
picture post card. It transformed the sea as well 
as the human beings. 

You might be feeling rather dismal at having 
come to a place where, even on the most beautiful 
day, the sea, instead of being blue, was the colour 
of a saucepan lid. Once again the picture post card 
came to your rescue. On the picture post cards all 
seas are blue. One need not go to the Mediterranean 
for colours that one can get at the nearest stationer's. 
i88 



ON PICTURE POST CARDS 

So noble, indeed, is every expanse of water as seen 
on the picture post cards that a traveller, visiting 
Switzerland for the first time, cried out enthusi- 
astically on seeing that exquisite pool of dyes, the 
Lake of Geneva, that it was " just like a picture 
post card !" 

And if your mind is of a romantic cast, eager for 
the spectacle of white and roaring breakers, you 
will find the picture post card of equal service. 

The sea that confronts your eyes may be as flat as 
a pancake, and the tide may rise and fall day after 
day with little, indolent waves that scarcely make 
more stir than a lodging-house spoon produces in a 
cup of tea. 

Consult the post cards, however, and see what a 
surf is raging. Breakers as high as mountains come 
careering in from the ocean. They dash up the 
beach, bite viciously at the promenade, and send the 
spray in a burst of bombs right over the house-tops. 
All that is needed in order to make the thing perfect 
is a minute gramophone arrangement that could be 
inserted in the card, and that would whistle like the 
wind as you looked at the picture. 

But, after all, it is not for one's own sake that one 
buys picture post cards, but for the sake of one's 
friends. One likes to let them know how one is 
enjoying oneself, and the picture post cards can ex- 
plain it far better than dull and acciu'ate prose. It 
would not be easy to write a description of those 
golden-headed children, those Italian seas, those 
189 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

monstrous and unprecedented breakers, without 
seeming to boast. The picture post card, however, 
transmits and magnifies one's boast without being 
a charge upon one's conscience. 

And now it is going to cost a halfpenny more. 

HoHdays, as I have said, will never be the same 
again. 

Mr Kellaway has, by a stroke of the pen, robbed 
the sea of its brightest colours and taken away the 
character of half the watering-places of England. 



190 



XXXI 

A GREAT CRICKETER— AND ME 

I MADE a curious discovery about myself at the 
Test Match at Trent Bridge. I watched 
Bardsley slowly shovelling up the greatest 
score of the match, and found myself watching 
him with especial interest — with something, indeed, 
like personal interest — because I had read that he 
was a non-smoker and a teetotaller. 

Three months ago this would have meant almost 
nothing to me. It would have been a trivial piece 
of personal gossip, not a fact of outstanding 
importance. 

I had, however, since then been concerned in a 
small experiment to see whether life could be pro- 
longed beyond Whitsimtide without the use of 
either tobacco or alcohol. I had found that in a 
sense it could. 

That, however, is neither here nor there. What 
amazed me at Trent Bridge was to find that 
simply because I had been abstaining from these 
things myself, I was specially interested in the 
success of Bardsley because he, too, abstained from 
them. 

It is as though one's interest in other people were 
191 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

only a part of one's interest in oneself. When 
Bardsley's score rose to 50, my subconsciousness 
was probably saying to me : " We teetotallers did 
that." 

Gregory might bowl like a railway train tearing 
through the gates at a level-crossing ; but, just be- 
cause one did not know whether he was a teetotaller 
or not, one looked at his triumph from the outside 
and had no palpitations over it. Pellew might beat 
the record of the west wind as he raced after a ball 
on its way to the boundary ; but, just because 
it was possible that he longed for a Woodbine 
between the overs, his genius seemed an alien 
thing — something almost inhuman and outside 
experience. 

But Bardsley! One's teetotalism and anti- 
tobaccoism conspired with his every stroke, and, 
had he driven the ball out over the pavilion beyond 
good and evil, one's heart would have tapped out a 
joyful "That was me!" 

I do not think this sort of egotism is exceptional. 
Most of us go through the world looking for our 
reflection. People who have grey eyes are pleased 
if you tell them that most men of genius have grey 
eyes. People who stammer get more pleasure than 
anybody else from stories about Charles Lamb's 
stammer. 

Charles Lamb becomes their mirror for the 
moment. They do not allow themselves to think 
openly, " Ah, yes, that's what I'm like ! " but there 
192 



A GREAT CRICKETER-AND ME 

is always an unexpressed thought of the kind in the 
background. 

We see a comparable sort of egotism in the 
attempts of various people to prove that Shake- 
speare was a Catholic, or a Puritan, or an Anglican. 
Most of us laugh at these efforts, but in the 
bottom of our hearts we cherish the hope that 
Shakespeare's religious ideas may not, after all, 
have differed very widely from our own. We have 
not the courage to say : "I am a Plymouth 
Brother ; therefore Shakespeare was a Plymouth 
Brother." But that is the sort of logic in which 
we secretly believe. Atheists probably see in 
Shakespeare a good specimen of an Atheist ; during 
the war professors saw in him the leading anti- 
German. 

How, then, is one to break oneself of this habit of 
the mirror — of this hunt for the ubiquitous reflection 
of oneself ? Had Bardsley been bowled first ball, the 
question would not even have arisen. One would 
have used him as a mirror, but in that case the 
mirror would not have been a flattering one, and one 
would not have talked about it. As it is, he scored 
66, and one is proud. One is prouder of being a 
teetotaller and a non-smoker than one has any right 
to be. 

That is why I have given myself warning. I 
have warned myself that, if this intolerable pride 
continues, either Bardsley must learn to smoke or 
I shall have to take to it again. 
N 193 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

And I feel perfectly certain that it is I, and not 
Bardsley, who will have to be sacrificed. 

I have a sort of premonition ... a feeling of rest- 
lessness ... an indefinable sense of a fragrance 
stealing back into the air. . . . 



194 



XXXII 

THE MONEY-LENDER 

I HAVE never been able to understand why 
money-lenders are unpopular. One may know 
a man half a lifetime — know him fairly in- 
timately — and yet shrink from asking him for the 
loan of a five-pound note. But money-lenders, 
with whom one has never even shaken hands, are 
continually offering one pocketfuls of money — 
money enough not only to pay one's inamediate 
debts, but to enable one to live in modest comfort 
for years to come. 

I had a letter from one of them last week. He 
marked the envelope " Confidential," like a man 
seeking to do good by stealth. He did not enclose the 
the money in the envelope, it is true : I should have 
liked him better if he had. But he offered to lend 
me a great deal more than any of my friends ever 
did. " Should you," he wrote, "require temporary 
cash accommodation, I am prepared to advance 
£50 to £10,000 on note of hand alone without fees or 
delay." 

Now I certainly do require temporary cash 
accommodation, though how the gentleman with 
the Bond Street address came to hear of it is beyond 
195 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

me. Is there a secret society of rich men in the 
West End with a force of detectives to ferret out 
deserving cases ? Did the Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer — gossiping, perhaps, at some wealthy 
dinner-table — let fall the fact that there had been a 
tell-tale delay in the payment of that last instal- 
ment of the Income Tax ? Or was I seen passing 
along Piccadilly, glaringly in need of a new suit of 
clothes ? 

I do not know. All I know is that at a moment 
at which I would have given a made-up dress-tie to 
be able to lay my hands on £10,000, the miracle 
happened, and the £10,000 fell, as it were, into my 
lap. Not literally into my lap, of course. I suppose 
I shall have to call round for it. But I have nothing 
more to do except write that note of hand, which 
must be a good deal easier than writing an article 
for a newspaper. 

Years ago I sent an appreciative reply to a gentle- 
man who had written offering to lend me £10,000. 
But I think he must have been what is vulgarly 
known as a " wrong 'un." Instead of accepting 
my note of hand, as he had promised to do, he sent 
a most unpleasant-looking person to look at my 
furniture. 

I confess I was disappointed. I was disappointed 
not only about the £10,000, but in human nature. 
After all, there were lots of other people jostling 
each other for the right to lend me £10,000. But, 
just when one's view of human nature is at its 
196 



THE MONEY-LENDER 

rosiest, to be called on by a man imperfectly shaved, 
who looks at one's sofa as greedily as though he 
wished to eat it, is a blow to simple faith. 

I feel sure that my new friend is different. At 
least, I am not going to doubt him in advance. He 
has a good address — a much better address than I 
have. I half suspect that he may have taken a 
fancy to something I wrote, and this may be his way 
of showing it. A loan may be merely a sensitive 
man's method of conferring a gift. Stranger things 
have happened. I have read about them in novels. 

My only sorrow is that I shan't be able to bring 
away the money in gold. I should like to have 
driven home in a taxi so packed with sovereigns 
that there would be hardly room to sit down, with 
sovereigns sticking all over me like confetti, getting 
into the brim of my hat and down my neck and into 
my boots. I should like to see them pouring out of 
the taxi door when I opened it, rolling on the pave- 
ment, and myself in such a glut of gold that I would 
not even trouble to pick them up. 

If this ever happens to me — and it cannot happen 
till the currency is restored — I shall owe it all to my 
money-lender in Bond Street. Can you wonder if 
I am a little extravagant in my appreciation ? 



197 



XXXIII 

THE CHEMIST 

THE chemist is on the whole the most enviable 
of men. He has all the pleasure of doing 
people good without ever having to get up 
at two o'clock in the morning, like a doctor, or hav- 
ing to perform a dismal round of baptisms, weddings 
and funerals, like a clergyman. 

He is the magician of the twentieth century. If 
only he were frowned on by the law, and we had to 
resort to him in secret, we could not fail to recognise 
how romantic and wonderful a person he is. With 
what fascination we should watch him among his 
phials and his tubes, measuring out his poisons, 
taking down jar after jar with its Latin words as 
tailless as Manx cats, shaking everything up into a 
brew the very prospect of which sends a man out 
into the street with faith in the future ! 

He himself until lately seemed aware of the 
wizardry of his work, and filled his window with 
huge purple and green and orange jars that made 
his shop stare at night like a dragon with different- 
coloured eyes. 

He is, I am afraid, abandoning those signals of his 
craft that proclaimed his descent from Merlin. 
198 



THE CHEMIST 

The modern chemist's window is usually devoted 
to a business-like display of cameras and tooth- 
paste and patent foods for babies. The world is 
losing another of its pictures. Art critics are con- 
stantly making a fuss about saving some Velasquez 
or Breughel for the nation. They would be better 
employed in saving the chemists' windows. 

Even if the chemist gives up his coloured jars, 
however (where do they go to, I wonder ? Does 
he still treasure them upstairs in the drawing-room ?), 
he will continue to be the most enviable of man- 
kind. 

He may become less like a character out of The 
Mysteries of Udolpho, but he will become more like 
a character out of Anthony Trollope. To be a 
licensed dispenser of poisons is romantic enough, 
but it is not the whole of life. One cannot live 
perpetually on so sensational a plane. 

What attracts me most in the chemist's life is 
that it must satisfy so fully the human instinct of 
curiosity. The chemist hardly needs to ask the 
most urgent of all questions : " How are you ? " 
He knows, when he looks at your prescription. 

He has all the secrets of the neighbourhood in his 
ledgers. He knows who has a cold and who has 
measles and who cannot sleep at night and who has 
enlarged his liver by the follies of the table. He even 
knows who has a corn and who has an ingrowing 
toe-nail. If he were in a mood to gossip, he would 
surprise you by the things he could tell. 
199 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

You might think he would grow morbid under 
the burden of so many secrets. On the contrary, 
he is the most cheerful of men. It is unsatisfied 
curiosity that makes men morbid. The chemist 
knows all the scandal of our bodies and can afford 
to smile. 

His life, too, is beautifully free from monotony. 
He has not to draw half-pint after half-pint of bitter 
like a publican. Everyone who enters his shop 
demands a different bottle. He has the varied life 
of an artist, and I often wonder that he does not 
sing at his work. 

His whole life, indeed, is a game of musical glasses. 
He improvises with his drugs as a musician might 
with the notes of a piano. His is the music that 
soothes the modern Saul. He will give you a 
strychnine fantasia that will set your pulses leap- 
ing, and he has a bromide adagio movement that 
will lull you like the sound of waves falling on the 
sand. 

If you are a true medicine-lover, there are few of 
his medicines that you will not find delightful. You 
will like one of his medicines because of its pleasant 
taste, and another because it tastes so unpleasant 
that it can hardly fail to do you good. 

There is a small minority who never take medicine. 
They are the kill- joys — the enemies of hope. The 
rest of us, whose cupboard shelves groan under half- 
emptied bottles, are not likely to be influenced by 
them. We are vehemently pro- chemist, and we 

200 



THE CHEMIST 

might sum up our view of him in a variant on Omar 
Khayyam : 

" I often wonder what the chemists buy 
That's half so precious as the stuff they sell." 

It is absurd that all the songs of the bottle in the 
poets should be about beer and whisky. What we 
need is a good song about cough mixture or the 
drops that cure head noises, dizziness, heartburn, 
tired feet, red noses, pains after eating, burning 
spot under left shoulder blade, watery eyes, facial 
blemishes, palpitation, projecting ears, and all the 
other ills that even you and I were never silly enough 
to imagine we had. 



XXXIV 

SITTING UP FOR THE NEW YEAR 

OF all human habits there is none more curious 
than that of sitting up for the New Year. 
Not only do we sit up, but we sit up in the 
spirit of an audience of school children waiting 
for the curtain to go up on a pantomime. This, 
too, in spite of all the warnings we get in a dozen 
prophetic almanacs as to what lies in store for us. 

I have not yet seen Old Moore for 1922 — neither 
the real Old Moore nor the authentic Old Moore, 
nor the Old Moore with which the other Old Moores 
have no connection — but I am fairly confident that 
it begins with a hieroglyph containing a picture of 
a house on fire, a railway accident, a riot, an earth- 
quake, and a crown toppling from the head of an 
unrecognisable monarch. 

It is just possible there may be a hint of a fashion- 
able wedding or of a baby being led to the christen- 
ing. But on the whole Old Moore eschews sickly 
sentiment and chooses the better part of the Fat 
Boy who liked to make people's flesh creep. 

In spite of this, most of us who sit up till twelve 
to-night — even those of us who feel that 1921 
deserves to be sentenced to penal servitude for life — 

202 



SITTING UP FOR THE NEW YEAR 

will feel kindly towards 1922. After all, it is only 
a baby — a helpless little thing. Hope gathers round 
its cradle. 1921 was old enough to know better. 
But this little parody of humanity, red, all but 
bald, and bawling — ^who but a Jonathan Edwards 
could damn it in advance ? Even if it keeps you 
awake at night, you will only have to rise and 
pat it on the right part of the back and all will be 
well. 

By the end of February it will be time enough to 
put it in the corner. By April you may legitimately 
address it as " Incorrigible boy." By June, when it 
is sowing its wild oats, you may ask with tears in 
your voice if it wishes to bring down your grey hairs 
in sorrow to the grave. By July you may take 
steps to export it to the Colonies, where Mr W. M. 
Hughes lives. By September you may be thinking 
of cutting off the remittance. By the 31st December, 
when you are preparing for the funeral, you may 
find yourself murmuring : " Perhaps it was for 
the best." 

But not now — not now ! Not till it has begun 
to play with the fire-irons. 

We do not look a baby, any more than we look 
a gift-horse, in the mouth. We do not say, " Oh, 
you little villain! What crimes you are capable 
of ! " but gaze at it with a wild, invincible hope 
that it will be a better man than its father. We 
cannot help believing that it is much more likely 
to be an Abraham Lincoln than a Charles Peace. 
203 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

A baby is always the most wonderful child ever 
born. 

That, I think, explains our attitude to the New 
Year. I for one regard the picture of the earth- 
quake as a slander. It may, for all I know, come 
true later on, but it is not true now. It is for 
no earthquake-monger or imp of railway accidents 
and houses on fire that we ring these joy-bells. 
Rather, it is for a cherub, innocent as the first 
Adam, trailing clouds of glory, howling for Paradise. 

And it won't be happy till it gets it. And it may 
get it. Miracles have happened. Who could have 
foretold the birth of Shakespeare or the invention 
of simnel cake ? Meanwhile let us prepare for the 
best. Who knows but in 1922 we may all learn to 
behave like human beings? Little 1922 is siich 
a pet, it is bound to make a difference. 



204 



XXXV 

A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE 

MRS BARNETT has been attacking nursery 
rhymes. She says that "Hey, diddle, 
diddle, the cat and the fiddle," is non- 
sense, and that we ought not to teach it to children. 

It is certainly nonsense, but that is no argument 
against teaching it to children or to anybody else 
who does not already know it. 

It would be better for the world to lose all the 
inventions of the last two hundred years — machinery, 
gas, electricity, railway trains, and the theory of 
relativity — than that it should lose its appetite for 
nonsense. 

There is no more to be said for nonsense than for 
laughter, play, or Christmas holly. All we know is 
that without such things the world would be one 
of the dark stars. 

After all, there is a good deal of sense in nonsense. 
It reminds us that we are temporary inhabitants 
of the most disorderly of the planets, which indeed 
has run away with us, whether we like it or not, 
like a bolting horse. 

We do not know how it all happened, and we have 
a still hazier notion of what is going to happen next. 
205 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

At times we get used to the motion, and we 
concentrate on clinging on resolutely. At other 
times we get a glimpse of the universe whizzing 
past, and, if that is not a cow jumping over the 
moon, our eyes are deceiving us. 

Rationalists will, no doubt, explain that the Cat 
and the Fiddle was a public-house, that the saltatory 
cow was seen by a late reveller, that the little dog 
was merely trying to bark its master home, and 
that the fourth line was his explanation to his wife 
when he caught hold of the table-cloth to steady 
himself and the supper things slid to the floor. 

But it is not what the rhyme means to us to-day. 
It is a tiny feast of unreason — a fantastic re-creation 
of a fantastic universe. It is a denial of use and 
wont — a breaking of the bounds of everyday ex- 
perience. It is a comic revolt against natural law, 
and a leap into the free air of miracles. 

It may be said that cows do not do such things. 
Well, this cow did. It still exists in a Utopia of 
nonsense, where Sunday falls in the middle of the 
week, where two sides of a triangle are not necessarily 
greater than the third side, where too many cooks 
make the broth a dish for an epicure, and where 
Rome was built in much less than a day. 

Experience may teach us otherwise, but we have 
to be on our guard against experience. Experience 
is merely an illusion of familiarity with a universe 
of which we know almost nothing. The child and 
the poet are not subject to this illusion. Hence 
206 



A DEFENCE OF NONSENSE 
their eternally fresh amazement. Hence their 
escape from under the iron heel of reason into the 
golden air of the imagination. 

Not that you or I can safely live in indifference 
to experience and reason. But we, too, need to 
escape now and then into the ports and happy 
havens of nonsense. Most of the Churches make 
allowance for some brief interval of folly — some 
holiday from seriousness, on which the world is 
seen to be as topsy-turvy as it really is. 

If good nature is a virtue, nonsense may even be 
defended on ethical grounds in that it helps to 
keep alive the habit of good nature. It may easily 
embitter a child to be taught : 

"How doth the little busy bee." 

But no child ever felt ill-natured while conning 
over the lines : 

" Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, 
The cow jumped over the moon." 

The nonsense-writers are the fathers of the church 
of good nature. There is no need to ignore Mill's 
Logic, but Alice in Wonderland is a necessary 
supplement to it. Of the two, Alice is probably 
the truer to life. It is by all accounts — I was never 
able to get through Mill's Logic — the more amusing. 



207 



XXXVI 

A MEDITATION ON MILK 

MILK ? Yes, it is a possible subject. . . . 
I did not realise until last week what 
a dangerous thing milk was. 
I met a lady who was in a state of extreme 
indignation because a rather advanced doctor 
had accused her of drinking milk with as severe 
an air as though he had caught her drinking 
whisky. 

" But it makes me feel better," she protested. 

" Of course, it makes you feel better," he replied, 
with a contemptuous sneer ; " that is the reason 
why a man drinks whisky-and-soda. Don't you 
realise that milk is a powerful stimulant — a far too 
powerful stimulant for a human being ? It is so 
strong that a calf fed on it grows to its full height 
in three years. The human being isn't intended 
to grow at that rate. To drink milk is simply to 
intoxicate yourself with ' boom-food.' " 

And he put her on to barley-water. 

It was a great relief to me to hear it. I had 

never liked milk. I had often watched people 

drinking it in restaurants and been conscious of a 

curious feeling of repulsion. They looked as if they 

208 



A MEDITATION ON MILK 

were enjoying it, and were, if anything, rather 
proud of themselves for enjoying it. 

I myself could never order a "small milk" in 
a restaurant except in an ashamed half-whisper. 
And, if the waitress did not hear me, and asked, 
" What did you say ? " I always repHed, " Coffee." 

Now I feel my blushes were justified. Milk- 
drinkers are simply tipplers, who prefer to stupefy 
themselves on animal, rather than on vegetable, 
juices. 

When I see anyone in future raising a glass of 
milk to his lips, I will lay my hand on his arm and 
say : " Hold I Is life so void of pleasure that you 
must drink poison ? Oh, set that tumbler down. 
Milk, my poor friend, is a raging demon. Look at 
America. Before America took to milk, she was 
all for the League of Nations. Since she has be- 
come a nation of milk-bibbers, she has lost all her 
ideals. She no longer cares for anything but more 
money to buy milk with." 

Then I would remind him how the great men 
who had poisoned themselves in the past had tried 
many kinds of poison, but that none of them had 
tried milk. 

" I can give you nine and ninety reasons against 
drinking milk," I would say in conclusion ; " can 
you give me even one for drinking it, except that 
you like it because it gives you a deceptive glow of 
well-being ? " 

Even the milkman seetns to be affected by the 
o 209 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

milk he carries round. He comes bawling up the 
steps, making a noise — " Mee-oh ! " — such as I 
have never heard from another human being except 
a tipsy man I once came upon who was trying to 
imitate a cat. 

And yet some people give milk to babies. 

I foresee the time when public opinion will assert 
itself and when the indiscriminate use of milk will 
no longer be possible. 

In those days the young man who asks a seem- 
ingly innocent country girl, " Where are you going, 
my pretty maid?" and who receives the conven- 
tional reply, " I'm going a-milking, sir," instead 
of proposing to accompany her to her dope centre, 
will insist that she must accompany him to the 
nearest police station. 

The milkmaid will be treated as a harpy, and 
as for the cow, big-game hunters will pursue it 
through the fields as a far more dangerous animal 
than a man-eating lion. 



210 



XXXVII 
CHILD'S TALK 

I WAS sitting in a railway carriage opposite a 
child who was holding a large elephant on 
wheels under its right arm. I cannot re- 
member what the child looked like, but I remember 
that the elephant had a skin of grey cloth and 
a red saddle, and that the child had squeezed 
its handkerchief under the saddle, and, pointing 
to this, said, as if telling me a secret : " My 
pocket." 

It always comes as a relief to me when a child 
ventures some remark of this kind, because when 
I meet a strange child for the first time in the 
presence of grown-up people I do not, as a rule, 
find conversation easy. 

One's ordinary conversation seems so far beneath 
the level of a small child. To say to it, " What 
wonderful weather we've been having!" would 
seemj^an outrage. The child would merely stare. 

Thirty or forty years hence it will have adapted 
itself to grown-up conversation, and will have 
learned to return babble for babble like an ordinary 
inmate of a railway carriage. At present it be- 
lieves that conversation should be as interesting as 

211 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

the things one thinks about, and that it should 
either be amusing or informing and serious. 

On the other hand, it does not regard as serious 
many of the things that you and I regard as serious. 
There is no use looking over your paper at it and 
saying: "Lloyd George seems to be getting into 
hot water with the French about the Poles." It 
has never heard of Mr Lloyd George, or of the 
French, or of the Poles. 

The only words in the sentence that will convey 
anything to its mind are " hot water," and these 
will call up a picture of somebody putting his toe 
into a steaming bath and having to withdraw it 
hurriedly. 

This may lead to some reminiscences of baths of 
its own and to a conversation on baths in general — 
especially on the horror of sitting on in the bath 
when the plug has been taken out, and there begins 
the gurgling of the animal that lives just under 
the plug-hole and is always trying to swallow you. 

One ought not to say " the animal," perhaps ; 
it is really called " the demon," or rather " the 
demond." Anyhow, it is worse than Mr Lloyd 
George, worse than the French, worse than the 
Poles. Mr Lloyd George does not at least hide 
down the waste-pipe and make gurgling noises. 

That is why the problem of making the bath 
safe for children seems, at the age of six, a matter 
of far more urgent public importance than the 
problem of making the world safe for democracy. 



CHILD'S TALK 

The truth is, perhaps, that either the child or 
the grown-up person is a Httle insane. We should 
certainly think a child of six mad if it said the 
things that men of sixty say in railway trains. If, 
for instance, a child of six broke in on a discussion 
on the coal dispute with : " Settle the matter once 
for all. Humph, humph! Like having a tooth 
out. Humph I Painful just for the moment. 
Humph! Feel all the better for it afterwards. 
Humph, humph, himiph!" — one would carry it off 
to a mental specialist to have its bumps examined. 

On the other hand, if an elderly gentleman went 
about carrying a grey elephant with a red saddle 
under his arm, and wearing his handkerchief under 
the elephant's saddle instead of in an ordinary 
pocket, we should regard this as even more con- 
vincing proof of his insanity than his remarks on 
the coal strike. If he pointed to the saddle and 
said with a beaming eye, as if conmiunicating 
a secret, "My pocket," one would undoubtedly 
change one's compartment at the next station. 

And yet, when the child behaved in this fashion, 
I experienced not only no alarm, but positive 
pleasure. The child and I had now something to 
talk about. 

I discovered that it was devoted not only to 
elephants, but to all animals — that it liked animals 
for toys and animals in stories. 

" You like animals better than people ?" I asked 
it after a time. 

213 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

It paused for a moment to consider whether I 
was the sort of person to whom one could tell an 
important secret. Then it nodded and confessed, 
ever so shyly, ever so sweetly : "I like animals 
and railway junctions." 

After that we had a perfectly engrossing con- 
versation. 



214 



XXXVIII 
WHY PAY TAXES ? 

MAN is the only animal that pays taxes. 
Other animals do most of the things that 
he does — most of the expensive things, 
at least, like fighting — but they manage to do 
them without being fleeced at the same time by a 
Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

I do not know who invented taxes. I suspect it 
was Civil servants, who could not otherwise have 
made a living. They saw that all would be well — 
for them at least — if they could persuade us to 
pay them for organising things that every other 
commimity of living creatures can do for itself 
without organisation. 

Could we not have imitated the bees who preserve 
perfect law and order without paying a salary to 
a single Home Office clerk? Could we not have 
modelled ourselves on the rooks, who punish the 
delinquents of the rookery without a costly retinue 
of policemen, gaolers, magistrates, and prison 
commissioners ? 

Even in making war, for all the money we spend, 
we do not seem to have been able to achieve more 
than the trick of killing each other at a distance 
215 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

instead of killing each other close at hand, as the 
other animals do. 

We are not really more deadly or devilish than 
the beasts of prey — the tiger, the boa- constrictor, 
and the flea on the Bombay rat. We cannot make 
fighting more fatal than it was in the days when 
Cain killed Abel. 

Some people even contend that, if we were 
disarmed altogether, and fought with sticks and 
stones and things that can be picked up on the 
roadside, fighting would be immensely more danger- 
ous than we have been able to make it in these 
days of bombing plane and submarine and poison 
gas. 

Why, then, all this nonsense of annual Budgets ? 
One would not grudge a few guineas if there 
were a chance of their achieving something that 
wild beasts do not do every day for nothing. 
One would like to see them used for the purpose 
of running a permanent Shakespeare theatre and 
paying a substantial fee to everybody, if any- 
body, who could be persuaded to attend. On,e 
would gladly see them spent on official propa- 
ganda in defence of Beethoven against the musical 
critics. 

There are many useful objects for which a 
Chancellor of the Exchequer might demand our 
money. He would be justified, I think, in raising 
a few millions for the purpose of providing osteo- 
pathic treatment for people who have developed 
216 



WHY PAY TAXES ? 

curvature of the spine as the result of too much 
strap-hanging. 

One would not object even to the money's being 
wasted, if it were wasted amusingly. But it is 
wasted in a way that seems to leave nearly every- 
body more miserable than they were before. 

Possibly, human beings prefer to be miserable. 
They undoubtedly pay statesmen to make them 
miserable. They will always support a statesman 
who says he wants to buy bombs. They are im- 
mediately suspicious of a statesman who says he 
wants to buy something useful, like a coal mine, 
or something amusing, like a telephone system. 

If he told them he was going to provide free meals 
in the restaurants, they would think him mad, and 
turn him out. On the other hand, if he offered to 
lead them to death and disaster, they would follow 
him with the wildest enthusiasm, and ask him if he 
was sure he had enough money to do the thing 
handsomely. 

I conclude that paying taxes must be a form of 
collective mania. It is the sort of thing no man 
would do solitarily. 

The ideal thing, in my opinion, would be to make 
taxes voluntary, so that anyone who wished the 
Prime Minister to take a firm line about Yap or to 
make war on San Marino could forward his request 
to Downing Street and enclose a cheque towards 
expenses. 

Under such a system a war could be floated like 
217 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

a company, and those who really wanted it could 
take the risks and pay the expenses. No one need 
fear that this would do away with war. It would 
be a poor war in which the shares did not stand at 
a premium within a few hours of the opening of 
hostilities. 



218 



XXXIX 

OLD CLOTHES 

I HAVE been reading a novel in which it is said 
of the hero that he loved his tumbledown 
home " as a man loves an old suit of clothes, 
ripped in one or two places and with some of the 
buttons missing." 

It is not the first time that I have found this 
sentimentalism about old clothes in literature. 
Authors, indeed, almost invariably write as though 
an old suit of clothes, with some of the buttons 
missing, were all that is needed to make a reasonable 
man happy. 

I do not wish to appear eccentric, but I must con- 
fess I do not share this passion for dressing badly. 

If I had my way, I should like to look like one of 
those glazed and elegant young men you see in the 
tailors' advertisements. 

I should like to wear a morning coat with braid 
round the edges, to have a crease like a live rail 
running down the front of my trousers, to wear 
shining patent leather boots, and altogether to look 
as if a valet, a barber, a bootmaker and a laundress 
must all be mighty proud of having assisted to turn 
out such a masterpiece. 

219 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

I do not take it as a compliment when people 
try to say agreeable things to me about my shabby 
clothes. 

I met a man the other day who said earnestly, 
looking at my bulging pockets and the baggy knees 
of my trousers : " I wish to heaven I had the courage 
to dress like you." I resented the remark, in the 
first place because he did not wish anything of the 
sort, and in the second place because he apparently 
believed that I had the bad taste to dress like this 
for pleasure. 

Believe me, there is no pleasure in it. I would 
dress like Mr Arnold Bennett if only I knew how. 

It is not at all amusing, if you take a seat in a 
first-class carriage, to have a ticket inspector on 
your heels, with a " Caught you at last I " gleam in 
his eye and a peremptoriness in the tone with which 
he says *' Tickets, please I " that is positively 
Prussian. 

If for any reason I have to travel first class, and 
I make my way to the door of the restaurant car, 
the attendant waves me back and says, with a 
frown : " Third-class dining-car lower down ! " I 
am sure he never says that to Mr Bennett. 

Life, it will be seen, is not a path of roses for the 
man who does not know how to dress. What it 
must be like for a man who actually goes about 
short of buttons and with rips in his garments 
one does not care to speculate. 

Some of the sentimental novelists ought to try 

220 



OLD CLOTHES 

the experiment of dressing like this, when they will 
see for themselves how little romance there is in it. 

I candidly admit that I like to see other people 
badly dressed, if they are sufficiently badly dressed, 
just as I like to see a picturesque ruin. But I do not 
myself like to be the ruin. 

If my hat sags like a weather-beaten roof, far 
from affording me any aesthetic satisfaction, it 
horrifies me only less than a perfectly new hat 
would, though I have often kept up my courage by 
pretending otherwise. 

If only I could remember to call at the hatter's 
I should certainly get a new one. But I have a 
memory that plays tricks, and the only time I ever 
remember anything about the hatter is when I am 
leaving home and when I get back again. 

And it is the same with the tailor. The tailor is 
my ideal man, for all the attempts of the proverb 
to belittle him. My favourite philosopher is Mr 
Bradley. My favourite characters in English 
history are the three tailors of Tooley Street. 

There is no man in whose hands I would trust 
myself sooner than in a tailor's. 

How nobly he amends the faults of Nature ! I 
had rather go to him for a neat pair of shoulders 
than to the sculptor of the Venus de Milo. He is 
the only person who could conceivably make me 
look like a Dana Gibson drawing. And I should 
like to look like a Dana Gibson drawing. 

That, I suppose, is what is meant by being a 

221 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

" gent." Nature may make a gentleman, but the 
tailor alone can make a " gent." His advertise- 
ments of "gents.' summer suits," and, still more, 
of " gents.' trouserings," always strike me as being 
the perfection of alluring prose. 

For myself, I would rather face the world in well- 
made " gents.' trouserings " than in the costume 
of a Greek god or in the toga of Julius Caesar. 



222 



XL 
THE MASTER 

I HAD often heard that the chief pleasure of 
motoring was neither driving nor being 
driven, but was crawling under the body of 
the car to find out the cause of the breakdown. I 
never believed this until Saturday. I believe it 
now. 

Not that it came to the point of crawling under 
the car. The trouble was only a minor one — a 
\ puncture — and could be diagnosed in a sitting or 
standing position. But at least it made an opera- 
tion necessary — two operations, indeed, for it 
happened twice. And I, being the only man 
present, and not much of a man at that, could not 
do less than offer to lend a hand. 

On the occasion of the first puncture, I stood 
aside and held things in the capacity of a nurse 
rather than of a surgeon. I was still a little awe- 
struck before the mystery of machinery. I felt 
that the motor car understood at least as much 
about me as I understood about the motor car. 
Hence I was content if I was allowed only to hold a 
wrench or a spanner, or to perform the last stages in 
loosening one or two of the screws. 
223 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

What finally converted me from an onlooker 
into a convinced motorist was the removal of the 
wheel. It was a very tight wheel — as tight as a 
double tooth. It would not have budged for 
Sandow. We all dragged at it and shook it in 
turn, but it made no difference. I myself shook it 
till the body of the car creaked and groaned and 
threatened to break into a thousand pieces. 

In the end we were all giving advice together, all 
tugging in different directions, and any passer-by 
must have thought that he was watching a road 
fight among a party of picnickers. 

We wrestled with that wheel like a frenzied 
octopus. Then, ever so suddenly, without anything 
to account for the change, it became submissive as 
a lamb. It glided gently off, and the motor car 
was left on the side of the road, three-legged and at 
our mercy. 

When I looked at my hands and saw how dirty 
they were, I was filled with such a sense of mastery 
as I had not known since I first learned to play the 
pianola. You, too, have probably had that wonder- 
ful experience. Yesterday you were unable to 
pick out the tune of Home to Our Mountains with 
one finger, and the piano was a Sphinx mocking 
your helplessness. To-day a rage is in your feet, 
and you sit at the piano, master of the passion and 
humour of Beethoven, of Bach's music from the 
sky, of the rapturous weariness of Chopin. It is 
a solemn occasion for those who have to listen to 
224 



THE MASTER 

you, but as for you, you are the instrument's 
conqueror. You are Napoleon at the battle of 
Austerlitz. 

On the whole, the motor car gives you an even 
greater sense of triumph than the pianola. The 
pianola does not make your hands and your clothes 
dirty. You have nothing to show for your trouble. 
You have none of the pleasure of removing grease 
and oil and dust with a piece of waste. 

When the second puncture took place, no power 
on earth could have prevented me from doing what 
I liked with that motor car. Single-handed I 
raised one corner from the ground — with the help 
of a tiny lever. Single-handed I removed the 
cap from the wheel — the most dogged and fiercely 
resisting cap it would be possible to conceive. 
Single-handed I wrenched off screw after screw. 
Single- (or rather double-) handed I gathered up 
the wheel in my arms and carried it off, and 
brought back another one and fixed it in its 
place. 

St George may have looked as grimy — he cannot 
have felt more gloriously exhilarated — when, his 
hair matted with perspiration and his suit ruined, 
he finally set his foot on the dragon's neck. 

I would not have exchanged the green and black 
and brown of my hands for the most silken skin in 
Christendom. 

A German student may look as proudly on his 
duelling scars. 

p 225 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

I suppose it happens to everyone at some time 
or other to cHmb to just such a peak of boastful- 
ness. But it cannot happen to anyone very often. 

Motoring would become too exciting if every 
puncture produced this fearful joy. . . . 

I wish you had seen my hands. 



226 



XLI 
BATHS 

THERE has been a praiseworthy attempt on 
the part of certain manufacturers to have 
a tax imposed on baths made by foreigners. 
Foreigners, it appears, have taken to dumping in 
England the baths that they ought to be using 
themselves. 

I am strongly of the opinion that baths ought 
to be taxed. At least cold ones ought. Human 
beings have been divided into two races — those 
who bath and those who don't. It seems to me 
that a much more real line of division falls between 
those who take cold baths and those who take 
warm ones. 

The men who take warm baths are as a rule 
quiet, inoffensive people, whom you could hardly 
tell from the people who never take a bath at all. 
They never boast. They think no more of taking 
a bath than of drinking a cup of tea. They regard 
it as the sort of thing anybody might do, and 
nothing to crow about. 

The men who take cold baths, on the other hand, 
have made such a song about it that many foreigners 
have been deluded into believing that splashing 
227 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

cold water all over the body — and the room — is an 
English national habit. 

As a matter of fact, it is nothing of the sort. 
The average Englishman would never dream of 
beginning the day by sitting down in a pool of 
cold water as if he were mad or a merman. No 
sane man would have consented to do such a thing 
before the nineteenth century. Socrates never did 
it, nor Shakespeare. 

The habit of singing in the bathroom (so fre- 
quently deplored by students of contemporary 
manners) may be attributed almost entirely to the 
innovation of the cold bath. Man in his first state 
of innocence does not sing in the bathroom. Be- 
sides, if one has an ordinary warm bath, one does 
not want to sing in it any more than one wants 
to sing at table. 

The cold bath, it is legitimate to conclude, has 
an intoxicating effect on the majority of those 
addicted to it, so that they lose all their sense of 
shame and begin to bawl like late revellers. In 
time, no doubt, a new Anacreon will appear and 
write a series of songs suitable for these Bacchana- 
lians of the cold tap. 

It will be a devil-may-care sort of poetry, I 
fancy, and far from edifying. It will do for cold 
water what " Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum I " 
does for fermented liquor. It will express a wild, 
unnatural gaiety — a loosening of the bonds of 
reason. 

228 



BATHS 

The cold bath is to be deplored, however, on 
other grounds besides the fact that it makes many- 
people sing who would otherwise be silent. That 
merely affects other people. It is the effect on 
oneself that is most appalling. 

I cannot explain what the effect is, but you can 
recognise it when you see it — the trembling hand, 
the white hair, the bowed back of the man who 
has never missed his daily cold bath for seventy- 
years. Yet, when once men have acquired a taste 
for it, they find it almost impossible to give it 
up. 

Argument is useless. You may tell them that 
it is against nature, and point out that a hot-water 
tap has been specially provided in every well- 
regulated household in order that they may use it. 
You might as well preach to the stones. 

So long as there are bathrooms these wretched 
victims of an insensate craving will not be able to 
resist the temptations of the cold tap. Tell them 
that they are ageing themselves prematurely : they 
merely laugh at you. Better anything, they feel, 
than that they should be deprived of their morning 
sensation. 

My own view is that, if you cannot prohibit self- 
indulgence of this kind, you can at least tax it. I 
should like to see warm baths made free for every- 
body, and cold baths taxed, like beer, at so much a 
gallon. Cold water is all very well in a river or in 
a pond : it is entirely out of place in a bath. I am 
229 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

not sure that the cold tap ought not to be labelled 
" Poison." 

It should certainly be labelled " Caution," and 
anyone under sixteen found turning it on should 
be put under the care of the court missionary. 



230 



XLII 
THE NAMES OF HORSES 

THERE was a curious item of news in the 
paper the other day. It appeared on the 
sporting page. This was the report of a 
race which was run at Lewes. One of the horses 
that took part was named League of Nations. It 
came in last in a field of eleven horses. The winner 
of the race was a horse called Thoughtless. Thus 
does life compose her ironic fables, and the very- 
Turf is ablaze with warnings to the heedless tribe 
of men. 

The victory of Thoughtless is not, I am afraid, an 
isolated incident in the year's racing. I have taken 
the trouble to look up a sporting calendar, and I find 
that on the whole the results of the season's races 
have been painfully discouraging to the angels. 
One of the most victorious animals of the year has 
been the filly Stupidity. Another winner has been 
Nonentity, who, by a curious chance, is a daughter 
of King William. Aimless has won, while Be Serious 
(whose dam was Don't Wink) has never succeeded 
in getting a place higher than the second. 

The light-minded Joy Girl, on the other hand, has 
never had any difficulty in getting a good place, and 
231 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

has on at least two occasions sailed in a triumphant 
first. 

Liberals have to face the melancholy fact that 
Wee Free took part in but one race, and was an 
"also ran," as a result of breaking a blood-vessel. 
Progress seems also to have run only once, and to 
have been all but last in a race which was won by 
Musket Ball. It is worth noting that in this race 
Demagogue was another of the horses that defeated 
Progress. 

Compare this with the records of some of the re- 
actionary horses. Battle of the Boyne has won one 
race, Orange William has won two. Orange Prince 
has won one, Carson's Boy has been second. And 
both Ulster Lad and Ulster Lady have twice been 
among the first three. 

Sinn Fein horses have not been nearly so lucky 
as this, though Rebel, Irish Volunteer, and Soldier 
Song have all won races. To balance these victories, 
Irish Republic was defeated in the Irish Oaks. 

The temperance party has, on the whole, had a 
good year on the race-course. Pussyfoot has won a 
race, though Pussyfoot II. has been less lucky. The 
victory of Sarsaparilla at seven to one more than 
balances the repeated defeats of King George's filly, 
Lemonade. Ginger Wine has also been a winner, 
while Champagne, Absinthe, Drinkmore, Brandy Snap 
and Christmas Trouble have all been defeated. I 
think the two victories of Dry Toast may also be 
fairly claimed by the temperance party. 
232 



THE NAMES OF HORSES 

I have no space to analyse the racing results of the 
season in greater detail, and I must leave it to Old 
Moore or some other seer to discuss their prophetic 
significance. 

Racing men, I believe, are among the most super- 
stitious of mortals, and, if they do not find sermons 
in stones, they find tips and omens everywhere else. 

I remember many years ago meeting a man who 
denounced himself bitterly for not having paid due 
attention to the omens. It was the year in which, 
within a brief interval, Manifesto won the Grand 
National and General Peace won the Lincolnshire. 
My friend declared that he ought to have foreseen 
this wonderful " double," because the Tsar's mani- 
festo to the Governments of Europe on universal 
peace was just then on everybody's tongue. 

I regard the victory of Thoughtless over League 
of Nations, however, less as an omen than as a warn- 
ing. At the same time I think that, if Major David 
Davies is going to call a horse League of Nations, he 
ought to make sure to begin with that it is going to 
be a winner. 

The most hopeful omen to be got from the year's 
racing, perhaps, is the victory of a horse called Unity, 
which is by Ulster King out of Irish Question. But 
I trust that Unity will not by any chance meet 
Thoughtless or Stupidity before the end of the season. 
Thoughtless and Stupidity are both exceedingly 
dangerous animals. 



233 



XLIII 
CAPTAIN CUTTLE WINS THE DERBY 

YOU probably won't believe me, but, when I 
was asked to go to the Derby, I w^nt home 
and dreamed a dream, and in my dream I 
saw Captain Cuttle breaking loose from a cloud of 
horses and dashing forward — oh, how magnificently ! 
— first past the winning-post. 

How did I know it was Captain Cuttle ? I cannot 
tell. I suppose the dream said so. 

I described my dream next day to several trust- 
worthy witnesses. 

"He flashed past," I told them — and my own 
eye must have been flashing — " like a kingfisher." 
They laughed scornfully. They always do. 

Yet, strange as it may seem, I did not back 
Captain Cuttle. 

You may put this down to moral reasons. You 
will be partly right. But there were other reasons 
as well. 

In the first place, no man, however much he likes 
horses, can back every horse in the race. 

In the second place, I was told by so many people 
that this year's Derby was any horse's race that I 
thought it was more economical to buy a fifty-to-one 
234 



CAPTAIN CUTTLE WINS 

chance on Silpho or Irish Battle than a mere eight 
or ten to one chance on Captain Cuttle. 

In the third place, Dr Freud has made me rather 
doubtful of dreams, and I thought that to dream 
about Captain Cuttle might merely mean that I was 
in love with a seafaring man's wife. 

In the fourth place, I was unlucky. 

It was bound to be an unlucky Derby, for this 
was the 139th time the race was run, and, as you 
can see for yourself, the digits in the number, if 
added together, make up 13. 

Superstitious people — it is extraordinary how 
superstitious some people become on a race-course — 
were pointing to the fact that Pondoland's number 
on the race-card was also 13. It was a bad day 
for several of us. 

It was not a bad day at all, however, if it had not 
been for the racing. 

A lark was singing in the sun as I walked along 
the Downs to the course, and every little hillock in 
sight was plumed with hawthorn. 

A woman in a shawl — call her a gipsy ; it is more 
romantic — held out her hand to every passer-by. 

" Leave a penny for the baby," she pleaded, " for 
luck." 

" You've a lucky face," she would say to a bulbous 
man to whose features it would have been impossible 
to pay any other compliment. 

A few yards farther on a little girl in a shawl was 
making an equally irresistible appeal : 
235 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

"A penny to bring you luck," she murmured 
gently, and luck is certainly cheap at the price. 

Then came a tipster with a brick-red face and a 
silk hat, standing under his banner in a hollow. 

" Did I tell you or did I not ? " he was challenging 
earth and sky hoarsely. 

" Of course," he sneered, " you people know all 
about horses. It didn't interest you when I told 
you I had a twenty- to-one winner." 

He impressed upon us the tragic situation of 
men who miss the chance of a lifetime through not 
buying a tip from a man who knew as much 
about horses as he did. 

Even so I found it easier to resist him than the 
tramp who offered me a " comic race-card," includ- 
ing a tip, for twopence. 

The comic race-card did not err on the side of 
refinement. 

It gave the programme of what it called the Epsom 
Salts Meeting, and the races included the Scratchy 
Selling Plate, with Eczema among the runners. It 
might, I thought, have been more amusing without 
any perceptible loss of grossness. 

I ignored the tip that was scrawled inside. It 
was Psychology. That was my only stroke of luck 
during the day. 

As for the race-course — ^well, you know what a 
crowd is like. But you do not know what this crowd 
was like, and I cannot tell you. 

It was rather like Hampstead Heath on Easter 
236 



CAPTAIN CUTTLE WINS 

Monday, and still more like a settlement of a million 
Red Indians with their wigwams, and most of all 
like Derby Day. 

The scene of the race, as you probably know, is 
a grassy hill- side between the two heels of a horse- 
shoe ; and inside the horseshoe is an innumerable 
collection of booths and book-makers with banners, 
of red motor buses and black motor cars, of human 
beings and ginger-beer bottles and pieces of waste 
paper, of pork pies and sweets that you couldn't 
eat and drinks that you couldn't drink, of tipsters 
and beggars and people with nothing to do, all 
in such confusion that the Recording Angel him- 
self would be hard put to it to tell one from the 
other. 

At one side of the horseshoe the stands rise tier 
above tier, like the boxes in Covent Garden — ^white 
balconies packed with men in tall hats and women 
whose faces were melting under their coloured 
sunshades. 

The men, I thought, were splendid. Never have 
I admired the dogged courage of my sex more than 
while I watched the members of the Jockey Club 
parading on the steep little green under their stand, 
each sheathed in a black morning- coat and with a 
black silk hat — or, at the very least, a white topper 
— on his head. 

It was all so correct. It was as correct as Addi- 
son's prose. And it was all the more heroic of the 
leaders of the racing world to dress Uke this, because 
237 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

most of them are elderly or old, and must have felt 
the heat oppressive. 

The Jockey Club, however, has a reputation to 
keep up. It is, I understand, the most exclusive 
club in the world, and there are men living who have 
won the Derby, even peers of the realm, who have 
never been able to get elected as members. The 
Jockey Club is the last stronghold, not only of 
respectability, but of ultra-respectability. The 
House of Lords is riff-raff compared to it. 

" If you see a man in there," said a friend to me, 
pointing to the stand, " you'll know he's all right. 
He's a good man." 

Many people do not realise to what an extent 
horse-racing is the sport of good men, and not only 
of good men, but of good old men. 

Let those who doubt it go and have a look at the 
Jockey Club stand at Epsom. 

As for the grand stand, it was just possible to 
move about amid the tumult and the shouting of 
the book-makers in Tattersalls' Enclosure below it. 

Hot ? A fat book-maker in a panama hat melted 
into thin air before my eyes. 

" Every Derby has a special name," a man said to 
me ; " this is the Sweat Derby." 

His own face was fuller of rivers than the map 
of England. Other book-makers sent for bottles of 
ginger-ale, and drank them, sizzling. 

Many people were wearing handkerchiefs suspended 
under their hats to protect the backs of their necks. 
238 



CAPTAIN CUTTLE WINS 

Medical students moved about outside, some 
dressed in white jackets with Scottish caps, others 
in some sort of Hiawatha garb, and collected money 
for the hospitals over the railings. The crowd thiew 
money and the students scrambled for it, tumbling 
about on the grass as if in a game. 

That there was coolness somewhere one could see, 
for the flags above the stands and above the wig- 
wams on the hill were moving a little. But the 
coolness did not reach to where I was. 

I sat down on a white-painted bench exposed to 
the sun. When I attempted to rise I found I was 
stuck to the paint as to soft glue. The bench will 
need a new coat of paint and I shall need a new pair 
of trousers. 

Still, it was worth it. 

I heard a man who was at the Derby for the first 
time saying : "It's the greatest spectacle I have 
ever seen." 

There is certainly nothing to beat it, if you except 
the Galway Races. 

It is a very pleasant pandemonium — a pande- 
moniimi to the eye and to the ear. It is a prodigious 
holiday — so prodigious that even the really hard- 
working people, such as the tic-tac men with their 
wildly waving arms and hats, are scarcely noticeable in 
the vast wilderness of men and women who have come 
to see other men and women enjoying themselves. 

It is a continent of pleasure flung on the low green 
hillSr . , . But I told you I couldn't describe it. 
239 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

I had been watching it for hours when the horses, 
thirty or so, came out in procession, headed by a 
horse-policeman, and paraded before the stands, each 
of them with a large number on the saddle. 

First came Dry Toast, with Carslake in green 
sleeves. After this came Tamar, with a jockey in 
such pretty clothes that one would have liked to buy 
him as a Christmas present for a good child. His 
light blue jacket was such a very light blue, and his 
pink cap was so exquisitely pink, that he and his 
horse between them would have made a perfect toy. 
One by one the long and dazzling carnival of toys 
filed past us. 

They were, I am told, a second-rate lot of horses 
for a Derby. Who, looking at them, could have 
admitted it ? There was nothing wanting to make 
the scene perfect except that Captain Cuttle was not 
to be seen in his place in the procession. 

People began to ask, " Where's Captain Cuttle ? " 
They were soon to know. Hardly had the troop of 
horses been led past us, each with a man at his head, 
when a rider in a red cap with a gold tassel, white- 
clad with a black hoop — for is not his owner also the 
proprietor of Black and White whisky ? — appeared 
in the distance, seated on a noble chestnut horse 
with a white face and a white stocking. 

It was Donoghue making his entrance like a star 
turn. He rode his horse quietly along the railings, 
lonely in his genius, and cheered for his genius as he 
passed. 

240 



CAPTAIN CUTTLE WINS 

Having made their bow to us, the horses turned 
and galloped back past us again on their way to the 
far tip of the horseshoe. The book-makers below 
were straining their throats in their last frantic 
appeal to last-minute betters. 

" Twenty to one Simon Pure ! Twenty-five to 
one Scamp !" 

At the starting-post it was some time before the 
horses could be got into position. Men with field- 
glasses watched them greedily and made impatient 
comments. Then, suddenly, there was a dash and 
a flash of horses, and the men with the field-glasses 
were muttering, " Re-Echo has failed at the start," 
" Scamp is going it," and reading every yard of the 
race for us like the words of a book. 

There were times when you could only see the 
jockeys' heads, dim as heat vibrations, above the 
heads of the far crowd. Then they were round 
the corner, and, one by one, they flashed past behind 
the crowd, like the flickerings of a cinematograph. 

Men shouted: "Come on. Scamp!" " Tamar's 
got it!" "No, Captain Cuttle!" And, as the 
horses came round Tattenham Corner and into full 
view, people once more said: "Tamar!" "No, 
Captain Cuttle ! " As they poured towards us along 
the straight, the shout became a scornful affirmation : 
" Captain Cuttle — easily, easily ! " 

Certainly, Donoghue's red cap seemed to leave 
the other horses farther and farther behind with 
every stride. They hung on, but they were fighting 
Q 241 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

with each other rather than with Captain Cuttle — 
fighting for a place. Captain Cuttle had but to 
decide the number of lengths he meant to win by. 

He swept past the post in a triumph of cheers, 
while well behind him a desperate medley of horses 
were sweating their souls out under desperate 
jockeys, as though they had determined to win a 
place or die. 

A minute later and the crowd had poured out on 
to the grass, and Donoghue was being protected 
like a king from the enthusiastic crowd by horse- 
policemen. His large face was all smiles under 
the peak of his red cap, as Lord Woolavington, tall 
and grey, led the horse in to be unsaddled. 

His hands, however, were trembling as he undid 
the buckle of the reins, and Captain Cuttle, pawing 
the green into dust, seemed to have felt the strain of 
the race less than he. . . . 

And that's how my dream came true. 

I wonder what Freud has to say about it. 



242 



XLIV 

ROYAL HUNT CUP DAY AT ASCOT 

" /TPMIEY treat it like a garden-part^," I heard 
I a youth say to the girl at his side, as the 
JL whirlpool of silk hats swirled slowly round 
under the blowing lime-trees in the paddock. 

Ascot, indeed, became more and more like a garden- 
party at the end of every race, in spite of the draught 
that was blowing everywhere and turning the faces 
of the gate-keepers blue. 

It was still more like a scene in a musical comedy 
— one of those scenes in which a large chorus of ladies 
and gentlemen, dressed as only actors and actresses 
can dress, drifts slowly in and fills the stage. 

You got this effect especially on the lawn under the 
trees behind the stands, with scarlet bandsmen play- 
ing in the middle of a ring of flowers, and luncheon 
balconies and all manner of little roofed tea alcoves, 
coffee alcoves and refreshment tents running round 
the sides. 

There was a small tent labelled " Iced Cups Only " 
— champagne cup, white wine cup, and all the rest of 
them. I did not see a man or woman brave enough 
to face such Arctic drinks on such an Arctic day. 

If there is a fault to be found with Ascot, it is that 
243 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

there is too much of it. It is, in a sense, a little world 
of the idle, but, unless you are in the Royal En- 
closure, it is impossible to enjoy a day's racing at 
it without an amount of long-distance walking and 
climbing that would test the heart of an athlete. 

For three pounds you get a badge — a brown, green, 
yellow and white shield — that admits you to the 
grand stand, Tattersalls and the paddock, and if 
you visit all three (as you are bound to do) in con- 
nection with every race, I reckon that by the end of 
the day you will have covered a distance equal to 
three times up and down Mount Everest. 

You have, first of all, to scurry along a long white 
underground passage, lit with electric lights, to see 
the horses led round in the paddock. 

You have to scurry back along the same long 
white underground passage to get to Tattersalls to 
lay your bets. 

Then you have to fight your way out of Tattersalls 
and hurry round to the back of the stand and climb, 
three steps at a time, the steepest stone steps that 
ever existed out of a mediaeval prison tower in order 
to get a good view of the race. 

After you have done this three or four times, you 
cease to remember that it is a cold day. Let me 
warn the young and foolish, who imagine that race- 
going is fun, that it is the hardest of hard work. 
Sitting in a chair in an office is a pastime compared 
to it. 

There is, I admit, the illusion of gaiety in the scene. 
244 



ROYAL HUNT CUP DAY 

There is a charming air of white and gold about it. 
Even the white notice-board that gives the names 
of the horses and jockeys before each race is tipped 
with gold spikes. 

The race-course itself is on a heath and is shaped 
like the outline of an egg drawn by a very small and 
very incompetent child. Behind it green woods upon 
green woods disappear into the distance and the mist. 

Inside the egg the general public presses up against 
the railings — a crowd pepper-and-salt in colour com- 
pared to the silk-hatted and flower-like crowd that 
mingles in the stands and on the lawns. 

Tipsters are at their capers among them, dressed 
like dismantled jockeys and in all sorts of guises. 
Book-makers have set up their huge umbrellas, and 
little flags flutter above the slate-like boards on 
which they chalk up the prices they are offering in 
accordance with the maniacal advice signalled to 
them by the tic-tac men, who are stationed in 
Tattersalls. 

Here, amid the din and the crowd, are also the 
private refreshment marquees of various clubs, and 
there is a constant coming and going of silk hats and 
flower-like forms across the green course through the 
white paddock gates. 

As for the paddock itself, it, of all parts of the 
ground, gives most the appearance of a garden-party. 

Here is the rendezvous of hats and dresses of 
men and women who are almost as pretty as the 
horses they have come to see. For human beings 

245 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

are, whatever may be said, exceedingly pretty 
creatures when they spend enough money on their 
clothes. 

It was disappointing, perhaps, to see so many of 
the women wearing cloaks over the dresses that had 
cost them so much thought and care, but, at least, 
they were expensive cloaks. 

But to walk among them was to feel that in a 
measure they were disguised — that, at the touch of 
a wand, they would break out from these cloudy 
coverings and shine forth in the splendour that only 
really exists in fairy tales. The sun was cloaked, 
and so were they. 

The men were bolder. Few of them wore over- 
coats, and it was delightful to see them promenading 
under the trees in spats that were as white as the rail- 
ings round the course. They were for the most part 
studies in black and white — ^black of hat and morning- 
coat and white of spat and button-hole. 

Men and women alike wandered about the pad- 
dock, visiting this ring and that, looking in at the 
stalls when the horses were being got ready for the 
Royal Hunt Cup. 

Montserrat — "or is it ' Montserrah ' ? " I heard 
drawled out under a tall hat — Lord Lascelles's 
charming brown horse, had a crowd of gapers round 
him, and a man poured water out of a beer-bottle 
on to a sponge, sponged the animal's tongue and 
moistened his muzzle, his cheeks and his brows. 

Round in a ring the horses were slowly walked, a 
246 



ROYAL HUNT CUP DAY 

man at the head of each, and a boy sitting on the 
back of Stratford (of whom so much was expected), 
in order, I suppose, to remind him not to be excited 
by the weight of a human being. 

As each horse passed, the name and number on 
its attendant's sleeve were scanned, and there were 
exclamations of delight when the beautiful dark bay 
Black Gown went by. 

" Looks as if he would be all right over the fences," 
said a sportsman. And perhaps that would have 
suited him better than Ascot. 

Leighton, looking compact and at ease, rather 
than like lightning restrained, passed amid dubious 
interest, and women did not exclaim, " That's my 
horse ! " as they did when they saw Highlander or 
Tetrabbazia. 

One horse went by, hooded like a member of a 
secret tribunal in sensational fiction. As it passed, 
a youth in a topper said to the girl at his side : 
" What's this one ? Mother always backs something 
in blinkers." Mother, I fancy, lost her money this 
time. 

As for me, I can't help admitting that I backed 
three horses for the Hunt Cup. I backed Cruben- 
more because I thought he was going to win, Scamp 
because I had already lost money on him in the 
Derby, and Varzy for a reason that will appeal to 
anyone who realises in what a very uncertain world 
we live. 

I had been thinking about Varzy — thinking with 
247 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

that intense seriousness with which one studies the 
records of horses — and wondering what on earth he 
had ever done to make a number of people discuss 
him so flatteringly. 

I think I should have decided that his chance of 
winning the Cup was small enough, if I had not looked 
up at the notice-board and seen beside his name the 
name of his jockey, Lynch. Now, on the previous 
day, I had had a letter through the post on the 
envelope of which my name was misspelled " Robert 
Lynch." 

"These things," said an American lady to me 
about something else the other day, " are not 
accidents — they're meant." 

I applied her philosophy to the situation, bolted 
like a rabbit through the underground tunnel, 
and forced my way — nay, fought my way — into 
Tattersalls. 

I heard a book-maker offering sixteen to one against 
Varzy, and I had just enough breath left to close 
with him. 

Then once more we had the procession up the 
stone steps, and, looking down, I saw the horses 
coming one by one out of the paddock for the pre- 
liminary parade before the stands. 

Jockeys, in an alphabet of colours, sat in tense 
positions on their backs. Donoghue alone, in his 
violet cap and violet and primrose garb, sat like a 
man at ease, and seemed almost to dawdle on the 
admirable black Crubenmore. 
248 



ROYAL HUNT CUP DAY 

It was as though he had relaxed every muscle and 
would not waste the tightening of a single nerve till 
he could do it to some purpose. It may be that this 
conservation of energy is part of the secret of his 
genius. 

Rain had by this time begun to fall. Men got 
into their overcoats, or, at the least, turned up their 
coat collars. The rain came like a mist on a strong 
wind and hid more and more of the green woods 
beyond the heath. 

When the parade was over the horses turned, as 
at touch of a spur, and galloped off full tilt into the 
teeth of the wind and rain towards the starting-post, 
the jockeys well forward over their necks. Scamp, I 
thought, had the legs of a scamp, flung about any- 
how. But Varzy — well, Varzy, as they say, took 
some holding. He had that splendid air of having 
a demon somewhere imprisoned in him that wanted 
to run away with his slight chestnut body. 

A few men in silk hats timidly put up umbrellas, 
but the crowd would have none of it and the hats 
had to suffer. 

The race for the Royal Hunt Cup is a race of a 
little over seven furlongs along a straight course. 
But you can only see the second half of it from the 
stands. As the horses drew near us in a swarm 
everybody was saying a different horse was leading. 

All I could be sure of was that Donoghue in his 
violet cap was flinging himself forward in the wild will 
to overtake and pass anything that was ahead of him. 
249 



THE SPORTING LIFE 

Then people said : " Varzy wins ! " But a second 
horse was straining after Varzy, straining until at 
times you would have thought that at last they were 
neck and neck, nose in a line with nose. And, still, 
Donoghue's terrible energy was sweeping on behind 
them, and you would hardly have been surprised if 
Crubenmore had suddenly risen on the wings of the 
wind and sprung at one bound beyond both of them 
to the winning-post. 

I can assure you it was exciting. People leaned 
forward in eager attitudes, as though they too were 
riding the loosed horses. I myself, I discovered, was 
crouching with arms up and mouth open. 

Never for a moment did Varzy cease to be in 
danger. Never for a moment did he fail to bound 
lightly just beyond the finger-tips of danger. And 
gloriously though Stratford strove to outreach him 
it was Varzy with the white face who tore past the 
winning-post, a winner by a short head. 

No one on the stand really knew which horse had 
won till the numbers went up on the board. 

A few minutes later the winner had been unsaddled 
and a man with a voice like many megaphones 
marched at brisk pace round Tattersalls, bawling 
"Weighed in! Weighed in!" at the top of his 
voice, as a sign that all was well, and that the book- 
makers could now pay out over the race. All the 
paying they had to do did not appear to make them 
very busy. 

Then the garden-party in the paddock was 
250 



ROYAL HUNT CUP DAY 

resumed, and I, for one, was feeling considerably 
warmer. 

There was now more time to enjoy the charming 
spectacle of immortal spirits, dressed in the latest 
fashions, walking to and fro, " all under the leaves 
of life." 

A poor Ascot, you think ? Well, I had never 
seen it before, and, as I do not know one hat from 
another, and rather like rain, I enjoyed it very well. 



251 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
,^ Cranberry Township. PA 1 6066 

■m (724)779-2111 












I: 1' l'' 



! •: 



f't 1* 
!,1 






illi;!! 



'111';;^,: 

iiiiiiiiif 






:i;';!j:';iili;l!,„ 

4m 









ij 



llii I 



tllllll slit 



i iilliii ■ 
■llllll<' 



,■1 !l I' 



! I 



9 It IH l\ Kill 



III. 

ill 



wm 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 






014 706 144 4 



i1illiiJ!.,lil 



I !i^i 



\\bim\ 
' i' 



iiinilji 



ij 

ill 
III 

ii'llfi ill! i( will 

!ilii! ■llii 



i, 



Ifllli; "■ 



I nil' 



I 



i 



i 









I I 






